How do I add a Yahoo search box to my site?

I agree with you about how complex Yahoo's search code is. In fact, I think that deciphering the Yahoo home page source code could easily be the final exam of a graduate level computer science course. It's really unbelievably baffling!

Fortunately you can reverse engineer the search by simply looking at the URL that is produced when you do a Yahoo search, strip out the unnecessary variables, and then build a rudimentary HTML form that produces the remaining. Let me show you...

I'll do a Yahoo search for Microsoft Zune and here's the URL that's produced:

Now, within the Web browser's Address box, I'm going to experimentally remove specific name=value pairs to pare it down to the bare minimum. Turns out that the following much simpler URL produces the exact same search result:

Nice! You can avoid all the other mumbo-jumbo, and thank goodness.

The form that produces that search looks like this:

That's all there is to it. Here's a Yahoo search box that has exactly that code underneath it:

One more tweak, though, just because that search box looks just a wee bit boring! You can drop in some minimal CSS and put a nice little box around the search form:

Which now looks like this:

Hopefully that'll help you out!

• Can I use CSS for drop shadows on my blog?
• How can I embed interactive photo panoramas on my site/blog?
• How can I create a Twitter search URL shortcut?
• Embed an audio player on a blog or web page?
• Add a Bing Search Box to my Web Site?

Reader Comments To Date: 6

Dave said, on February 11, 2008 1:57 PM:

Using the above code worked fine but is it possible to have the search results open in a new page or tab(IE7)instead of navigating away from my website
Thank's
Dave

Dave Taylor said, on February 11, 2008 3:16 PM:

Dave, just add "target=_blank" within the FORM tag in the code above and you should have the behavior you seek.

Liz said, on February 20, 2008 7:42 AM:

Hi,

I am adapting the code to work with an affiliate programme. Problem is that I need to add other parameters to the URL.

Using your yahoo example it would be like I need the end URL to be:

http://search.yahoo.com/search?fr=yfp-t-501&p=microsoft+zune

I have tried making the action URL http://search.yahoo.com/search?fr=yfp-t-501&

But it strips off everything after the ? before adding the search term.

Raja said, on December 8, 2009 8:03 AM:

Hi....

I have developing a website using PHP. I want to integrate yahoo search into my website. I trying this code. The answer is display in new page. I want to display result in my page only. Is it possible?

Raja

Dave Taylor said, on December 8, 2009 8:29 AM:

Raja, no that's not possible, at least not easily. The easiest possibility would be to use an iframe for the search and search results, but you can't have a small search window and a large search results window. More complicated would be for you to write some software that would submit the search, get the results, and then embed the results in a page of your own. Complicated.

alis said, on February 19, 2011 12:10 AM:

pls sir add my site yahoo search engine

I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you, Dave, for all your helpful information by buying you a cup of coffee!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!