Yahoo have been trying to reach out to developers, and as such have opened up their search platform so that external developers can use Yahoo technology in various new ways. Yahoo is providing access to its APIs for a variety of its search services, including web, image, video, news and local search. The scope of this is potentially enormous.
"Yahoo can't be everything to everybody. This is the first time we're providing formal APIs to developers to write new search applications that run on top of our infrastructure. There are hundreds of ideas (for search applications) we haven't thought of that will be enabled by these APIs." - Eckart Walther, head of product management for Yahoo Search.