Hey All, Yahoo! turned the keys of their blog over to me for one post so I can tell you about a book I put together called Yahoo! Hacks. If you're not already familiar with O'Reilly's Hacks Series, don't worry, the book isn't about breaking into Yahoo! without permission. Instead, the Hacks Series is trying to reclaim the word "hacks" for the good guys, using the word in its original geeky sense of describing a cool technical shortcut, useful bit of code, or a clever use of an existing application. Each hack is a tip, trick, or project you can put together that uses Yahoo! in a unique way—ranging from using simple shortcuts to fine-tune searching to adding new features with Yahoo! Web Services.

Here's a quick example. I like to change my desktop background. Most of the time I spot something on the Web at random, right-click the image, and choose "Set as Desktop Background..." from the menu. This method isn't perfect though because most of the time the image isn't quite the right size for my desktop. So I have to go into my desktop settings and choose "stretch" or "center" to see which is the best way to display the background picture. Stretching the image usually means the picture will look blurry or distorted, so ideally I'd like to find images that are the right size for my desktop.

Yahoo! Image Search is great for spotting new desktop backgrounds. Yahoo! has already done the work of gathering thousands of images from across the Web into one interface for browsing. And if you know a few of what Yahoo! calls Search Meta Words, you can specify the size of images you'd like to see. Try a search for cityscape, and you'll find thousands of images of all shapes and sizes. Say your screen resolution is set to 1024 x 768, you can specify that with the width: and height: Search Meta Words. So the query cityscape width:1024 height:768 will give you only images that are a perfect match for your desktop background.

In Yahoo! Hacks, Hack #83 shows how you can take this idea a step further with a bit of code to set a new desktop background automatically when you start your computer. So you specify a word like cityscape, and Yahoo! Web Services will deliver a random image to your desktop. It won't always give you a background image that you'd set for yourself, but it's a fun example of using Yahoo! to bring some randomness into your life.

Another of my favorite Search Meta Words is aspect: for Yahoo! Video Search. The term aspect ratio refers to a video's display width divided by its height. As HDTV is taking off, more and more video is available in a widescreen format which is represented by the 16:9 aspect ratio. Standard television video has a 4:3 aspect ratio—almost a square, and computer monitors 5:4. With a little math, you can tell Yahoo! Video Search which aspect ratio you're looking for. You take the video width multiplied by 100, then divide by the height and round down. That means widescreen movies and HDTV have the computed aspect value of 177.

Here's a quick way to see how it works. Try a search for Matrix at Yahoo! Video Search and you'll get over 20,000 results. Now specify the aspect ratio by searching for Matrix aspect:177 and you'll get under 100 results, but each result is in widescreen format. (Usually a bit higher quality than 4:3 videos.) There are quite a few Search Meta Keywords for Yahoo! Video Search, and Hack #11 in the book explains them all.

Many thanks to the fine folks here at Yahoo! Search Blog for letting me tell you a bit about Yahoo! Hacks, I hope you'll check it out. And happy Yahoo! hacking (the good kind).

Paul Bausch
Author