Yahoo API! Yahoo API! Yahoo API!

That noise you heard coming from the east coast was my cheering for Yahoo's new Developer Network and API, as announced in their blog at http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000084.html . The new Developer Network is available at http://developer.yahoo.net/ .

The first thing you'll need to do is get your application ID, which requires a Yahoo account. If you have a Yahoo account, all you have to do after that is pick your application ID. There doesn't appear to be any additional registration beyond the Yahoo account registration.

Once you've got an application ID, you'll need to download the SDK. Once you've agreed to the terms of service, you'll be able to download a zipped or TARred bundle that includes examples in Perl, PHP, Python, Java, and JavaScript.

There's a FAQ that outlines what's available. You'll see that the Yahoo API offers access to several different Yahoo services -- Image, Local, News, and Video search -- not just Web search -- heck yes. Yahoo uses REST, not SOAP, and provides 50 results per query except for Yahoo Local, which provides twenty. (The Google API provides ten.) Like Google, the API is for non-commercial applications only and Yahoo lists some other applications for which the API may not be used.

The query limit of the API is tied to the IP address used, and varies for each service. Yahoo helpfully explains the limit and shows the error you'll get if you use too many queries (nice so you don't just get an error and wonder what happened.)

Documentation? Yahoo's got documentation available on the site of course, but has also already set up a very nice infrastructure. There's a Yahoo Developer Wiki, which includes a list of applications (a bunch of them are available already), Tips and Tricks (this is empty), FeatureRequest (several items -- how about spacing them a bit?) , and a few external links. There's a blog specifically for the developer network, and a set of mailing lists.

I can't tell you how glad I am that Yahoo has done this. Not only have they developed an API, which I've been yelling about for a while, but they've gone beyond the minimum. They've broken out their API so it accesses several different Yahoo services, not just Web. And they've set up a wonderful infrastructure -- the wiki, mailing lists, and Weblog -- to support what will hopefully be a strong community of developers.

All this makes the Google API ( http://www.google.com/apis/ -- last release note update August 30, 2002) look a bit thin. Okay, a lot thin. Maybe this'll be the push that has Google release some cool new API stuff?

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