Question

When I’m using search.web YQL table, I always get the error:

No definition found for Table search.web

in my YQL statements. Even when using SELECT url FROM search.web(0,10) WHERE query="stackoverflow" for example.

So I am assuming Yahoo discontinued search.web or BOSS? What are the alternatives? Is there still a similar way to crawl the web?

Answer 1

We can read in YQL Blog:

We’ve removed all search tables that relied on the BOSS v1 API (search.web, search.image, and search.news) as the aforementioned BOSS v1 no longer exists as of today (http://www.ysearchblog.com/2011/06/30/you-asked-for-this-boss-v2-updates/).

For those of you relying on those tables please consider using the community BOSS v2 table (https://github.com/yql/yql-tables/blob/master/boss/boss.search.xml).

Thanks -YQL Team

Source: Search tables and BOSS v1 in YQL Blog.

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As a result, you should move to another search service like Y! BOSS v2. As mentioned above there are already open data tables for that, and an example query would look like:

SELECT * FROM boss.search WHERE query="stackoverflow"
AND ck="your oauth consumer key" 
AND secret="your oauth secret"

Another alternative is to use Bing search:

SELECT * FROM microsoft.bing.web WHERE query="stackoverflow"