Wednesday, June 02, 2004Yahoo Groups Message Search
I am a member of the pigeongenetics mailing
list hosted on Yahoo Groups.
Recently another member asked about a color mutation which I felt certain
had been discussed in the past on this mailing list. I thought a pointer
to previous discussion on the mutant might be helpful as background for the
current discussion. And so I tried to search the message archive for
the mailing list.
The message archive search function for Yahoo
Groups is not a shining example of user-friendliness. I say this
because one cannot search the entire message archive in one pass. Instead,
one can search a seemingly arbitrary subset of the message archive and if one
does not find messages in that set, perversely, one needs to click a
link labeled "Next" to search through an older set of
messages. It seems a little contrary to what I would expect for that
link to be labeled "Next". Of course, it is next in
the sense of searching the next oldest set of messages, I suppose.
I tried grabbing the search URL and manually
modifying it to see if I could search the entire archive that way.
The search URL seems to take this general form:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/<group
name>/messagesearch/<message number to search back
from>?query=<term to search for>
I noticed there's also a dir parameter on some of
the queries but I can't quite figure out what that's about.
I'm guessing that the number of messages searched
in one pass is dependent on the length of the original messages because there
doesn't seem to be a fixed number grabbed in one chunk. For example, if I
specify "190" as the message number to search back from, messages 190 through 32
are searched. That's a range of 158 messages. However, if I specify
"175", messages 175 through 1 are searched--a range of 174 messages.
So I started looking for a Web Services API such as
the one that Google offers. I did find some reference to an XML-RPC or REST interface for
blogs to notify Yahoo that their RSS feed has been updated.
If anyone knows of any documentation covering this
query URL syntax, a web services API exposed by Yahoo, or anything else that
might help me to easily search the entire message archive for this mailing list,
please post something in the comments.
6:18:32 PM #
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