Author Archive

Managing the update of our Search Web Services SDK gave me the chance to appreciate some of the raw programming talent that exists both inside and outside of Yahoo!. Yahoo! s own Premshree Pillai flexed his chops by quickly putting together new wrapper classes for both Ruby and Lua on short notice. Returning Yahoo! contributors Ryan Kennedy Java and Leif Hedstrom Python provided much needed updates to their already popular contributions. Did I mention that our Flash developers rool? Yahoo! s Caleb Haye has a particularly flashy Flash demo in the SDK while one of my fellow evangelists, Kent Brewster, offers a tasty bit of script tag hackery in his JavaScript sample. Third party developers also came through with style. Martin Brown C VB , Daniel Jones C VB Java , and Jeffrey Friedl Perl , rounded out the offerings with strong contributions. Martin has updated his fine C and VB.NET wrapper classes while Daniel Jones did the simpleSearch examples for C VB.NET and Java. Jeffrey has been maintaining his Perl wrapper in the CPAN archive for some time. All in all, an impressive bit of programming. Download it right here.

Hot on the heels of last week s new Search SDK, version 2.01 is out. It contains an updated release of Jeffrey Friedl s Yahoo::Search Perl package. He discussed the bug on his site yesterday. Thanks to Jeffrey for fixing this while in the middle of traveling! Jeremy Zawodny

Last week several members of the YDN team myself included spent some time up in Portland at the annual O Reilly Open Source Convention. I always enjoy attending OSCON I ve been to all of them scary! , and this year was no exception. The talks I attended easily held my interest and the people, as always, were top notch. Lots of good geek out time was had by all. Above: Avi Bryant of Smallthought, the folks behind dabble db, sporting one of our shirts. : And giving out YDN t shirts at the Yahoo! booth meant getting a chance to find out what people do and don t know about the APIs we offer. In fact, I made a point of quizzing booth visitors to see which Yahoo! APIs they knew of. Our Maps and Geocoding APIs were especially popular. But I surprised people most often with YUI, our BSD Licensed User Interface library. Each time I d describe some of the cool things you can do with it and someone would say, that s great… but are you actually using it on Yahoo? Of course we are! I d say. Using the YUI blog it was easy to rattle off Ten Things Yahoo! Is Already Doing with the YUI Library. This isn t just some code we threw over the proverbial wall. It s actually running on Yahoo! and is even heavily documented. Take that, Matt! : Jeremy Zawodny

Dave Pell and team at Rollyo have relaunched their roll your own search engine with lots of new features, and we re proud that Rollyo is powered by the Yahoo! Web Search API. The roll your own concept core to Rollyo means that users can easily create search engines that include only the sites they select for the search engine. There are many features beyond the core read their About page for all the details. When presented about Yahoo! APIs at Duke University last spring, I demoed Rollyo and showed everyone the Duke Hoops engine which searches across thirteen different sources chosen by the user everything from the local newspaper Durham Herald Sun to major media Sports Illustrated to favorite bloggers http: www.dukeblogger.com . If Duke basketball isn t your cup of tea, then maybe pop surrealism is what you re looking for the possibilities are infinite. I really love the way Rollyo describes the role of Yahoo! web services in the Rollyo FAQ: Yahoo provides the engine and Rollyo puts you behind the steering wheel. Nice. We re not the only ones who love Rollyo. Check out the review from TechCrunch and SearchEngineWatch. Congrats to the Rollyo team on a succesful relaunch! Chad Dickerson

We re launching the latest addition to the YDN site today: the Python Developer Center. YDN Developer Centers offer tutorials, links and resources to help you get the most out of YDN using your favourite programming language; PHP and JavaScript are already covered, and more languages are on the way. Python is a great language for exploring web services, thanks to its handy interactive prompt and extensive range of built in libraries. If you re new to Python, we have collected some useful links to get you started. If you re already comfortable with the language you can dive straight in to the HOWTOs which discuss techniques for accessing the YDN APIs. We ve also created a new Yahoo! Group: ydn python. Join up and get help or discuss your favourite API tricks and techniques. Simon Willison

If you ve been using our Site Explorer APIs, check out the Update Notification ping call that we added today. This coincides with an overall update to Yahoo! Site Explorer. In addition, this is a big week in the Web Search world. The annual Search Engine Strategies Conference is in town San Jose and packed full of search and on line marketing talks, presentations, and panels. On Thursday morning at… yawn, 9am , I ll be on a panel simply called Search APIs. As you d expect, I ll talk briefly about our Search APIs and answer questions. : Hopefully I ll see some of you there. Jeremy Zawodny

Yahoo! Answers today launched four Answers APIs. You can search for questions about anything, narrow your search down by category or user, and see full details of any question, including all the answers. In addition to XML and serialized PHP, the Answers APIs supply results in JSON format, so you can write proxy free Web applications. Much more is online at the Developer Network, including our first API Explorer, so you can try things out right there on the site without writing a line of code. Dan Theurer

Starting a few minutes ago, all of our Yahoo! Answers APIs began accepting a new output type, RSS. The API Explorer has also been updated; it will now output XML, JSON, RSS, and PHP. If you don t feel like building an app, or you re just getting started, you can use your RSS reader to subscribe to a search just as if you were on the Answers page itself.

We are happy to announce the latest addition to our Developer Central section. Hidden between various language specific Developer Centers, the SDK, and the YUI Libraries, you ll find a new section: Security Best Practices. Security Best Practices includes useful information about writing secure applications for secure servers, such as how to protect your application against SQL injections, what needs to be done to prevent XSS or request forgeries, and more. Dan Theurer

Want to know where people are going and what they re going to do once they get there? Planning the ultimate Maui vacation or honeymoon in Vegas? Check out our brand new Local Search additions, collectionSearch and getCollection. Search for a service or destination and you ll be rewarded with user created travel collections from all around the world. Kent Brewster