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Search engine welcomes hackers

Taiwan’s largest search engine opened its doors to hackers over the weekend in an effort to promote its new global strategy.

For 24 hours beginning on Saturday at noon, 179 software developers and 38 teams participated in Yahoo-Kimo Inc’s (雅虎奇摩) Open Hack Day, held at the Y17 Taipei Youth Recreation Center.

Participants were encouraged to create Web applications, ideally using one or more of Yahoo’s application program interfaces (API) such as Yahoo Map, Knowledge, Flickr or Auctions.

“This is the first time Open Hack Day has been held in the Asia Pacific; representatives from Yahoo Hong Kong, Korea and Australia were present to witness this special event,” Peter Lin (林振德), vice president of Yahoo’s technology group in Asia, said during the 24-hour marathon.

A six-member team called Kekeke (科科科) won the top prize of NT$300,000. The group, led by Tempo Feng (馮彥文), created “Firefox Extension,” which utilized several of Yahoo’s APIs.

Feng said the program allowed users to conduct their own search, rather than being limited by the search engine’s pre-existing criteria.

“Similar to the technology seen in Tom Cruise’s movie Minority Report, when you search for a picture, various applications such as Flickr, Knowledge and Map will give you different results. From these isolated results you can pick and choose which picture is best for you,” Feng said in a phone interview yesterday.

Yahoo cofounder David Filo handed out prizes to the winning teams. He opened the Taipei Open Hack Day event, saying the company’s “open strategy has officially become part of Yahoo’s DNA.”

Lin said that Taiwan had always been at the forefront of Yahoo’s Web services development.

“Other than the US, Taiwan is the only other country in the world which has rolled out the Yahoo Developer Network platform,” Lin said.

“Our ‘open strategy’ refers to opening up Yahoo user experiences … and data repositories to the innovations of the developer community. Yahoo’s goal is in essence to re-wire the Web site and fundamentally transform how people experience Yahoo,” Huang Ming-yi (黃明頤), Yahoo-Kimo’s senior manager of public relations, said in a phone interview yesterday.

Open Hack Day started internally at Yahoo’s corporate campus in Sunnyvale, California, in 2004. It became a public event in 2006, and since then similar events have been held in Bangalore, India, and London, England, Huang said.
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