Search Web Services: Spelling Suggestion

We’re shutting down this API in April 2011. We will, however, continue to offer identical functionality through the Spelling Suggestion YQL table, and recommend that you use that instead. For further details, please see the Deprecated Services blog post.

Submitting Spelling Queries

The Spelling Suggestion service provides a suggested spelling correction for a given term. See also the other Web Search services.

Request URL

http://search.yahooapis.com/WebSearchService/V1/spellingSuggestion

Request parameters

See information on constructing REST queries

Parameter	Value	Description
appid	string (required)	The application ID. See Application IDs for more information.
query	string (required)	The query to get spelling suggestions for (UTF-8 encoded).
output	string: xml (default), json, php	The format for the output. If json is requested, the results will be returned in JSON format. If php is requested, the results will be returned in Serialized PHP format.
callback	string	The name of the callback function to wrap around the JSON data. The following characters are allowed: A-Z a-z 0-9 . [] and _. If output=json has not been requested, this parameter has no effect. More information on the callback can be found in the Yahoo! Developer Network JSON Documentation.

Sample Request Url: http://search.yahooapis.com/WebSearchService/V1/spellingSuggestion?appid=YahooDemo&query=madnna

Response fields

The schema document for this service response is located at http://search.yahooapis.com/WebSearchSpellingService/V1/WebSearchSpellingResponse.xsd

Field	Description
ResultSet	Contains all of the suggestions.
Result	The text of the suggested correction.

Sample response

The following is a sample response for the query Madnna which returns the correction to the misspelled word:

<ResultSet xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="urn:yahoo:srch" xsi:schemaLocation="urn:yahoo:srch http://search.yahooapis.com/WebSearchService/V1/WebSearchSpellingResponse.xsd"> <Result>Madonna</Result> </ResultSet>

Rate Limits

The Spelling Suggestions Web Search service is limited to 5,000 queries per IP address per day and to noncommercial use. See information on rate limiting.

Errors

The Spelling Suggestions Web Search service returns the standard errors. There are no service-specific errors.

Terms of Use

Please see our Usage Policy to learn about acceptable uses and how to request additional queries.

Support & Community

The Spelling Suggestions Web Search service is discussed on the yws-search-general mailing list.