Implementing popular web services, like video and image searches, within your own web site can be a powerful mechanism and handy when it comes to keeping visitors engaged. The good news is that you, as a PHP developer, can easily take advantage of these services by using the set of thorough APIs provided by Yahoo!. So if you're curious about how to do this, start reading this article now!

Now that I've introduced you to the main subject of this series, it's time to rehash the interesting topics that I discussed in the preceding tutorial. In dong so, you’ll be able to easily recall all of the key concepts surrounding the implementation of the useful Yahoo! Web Search Service in conjunction with PHP 5.

Simply put, in the previous article of the series I provided you with a quick overview of how to integrate the aforementioned Yahoo Web Search Service by coding a basic PHP 5 script that was tasked with performing two primary tasks. First, it must query the service via the submission of a typical query string (as you’ll probably remember, the term “Madonna” was used in that case), and second, it must fetch the corresponding results in the form of a serialized PHP array.

Once the search results in question were retrieved by the script, they were properly formatted by using a few basic (X)HTML tags and displayed directly on the browser. Of course, the most important thing to stress here aside from the formatting process is that those results were returned as a multidimensional PHP array by including into the respective query string the “output=php” option, which enormously facilitates parsing any output produced by the web service. This is because this procedure involves only the utilization of some simple array processing functions bundled with PHP.

At this point, I’m reasonably sure that you’re familiar with parsing the eventual results returned by the Yahoo! Web Search Service when they’re retrieved as a serialized PHP array. So based on this assumption, in this third chapter of the series, I’m going to continue exploring in detail other helpful web services offered by Yahoo!, such as those focusing on searching images and videos. Also, I will demonstrate how they can be queried directly from a basic PHP 5 application and process the corresponding search results by utilizing the same group of array handling functions that you saw in the previous article of the series.

Hopefully, by the end of this tutorial you’ll be equipped with a decent background to start using these additional Yahoo! web services within your existing or future PHP 5-driven applications. Thus, don’t waste more time in preliminaries; begin reading now!