Yahoo Clues is like Google Insights for Search. It has one interesting thing that the latter doesn’t though: search flows.

It doesn’t have an official API, so I thought I’d document the unofficial one. The API endpoint is

http://clues.yahoo.com/clue

The query parameters are:

  • q1 – the first query string
  • q2 – the second query string
  • ts – the time span. 0 = today, 1 = past 7 days, 2 = past 30 days
  • tz – time zone? Not sure how it works. It’s just set to “0” for me
  • s – the format? No value other than “j” seems to work

So a search for “gmat” for the last 30 days looks like this:

http://clues.yahoo.com/clue?s=j&q1=gmat&q2=&ts=2&tz=0

The response has the all the elements required to render the page, but the search flows are located at:

  • response.data[2].qf.prevMax – an array of queries that often precede the current one
  • response.data[2].qf.nextMax – an array of queries that often follow the current one

The other parameters (such as demographic, geographic and search volume information) is pretty interesting as well, but is something you should be able to extract more reliably from Google Insights for Search.