Web Services are a way for application developers to access content and services to build new applications. For example, you can combine our data and services with those you create in a desktop application or those offered by other Web sites. With Yahoo! Web Services, more of the power of the Yahoo! network is in your hands.
Yahoo! Web Services are for developers, businesses and researchers interested in using Yahoo! products, services, data and content as a resource in their applications. Right now, this program is free, subject to no SLA or uptime agreement, and subject to daily limits on query volume. If your requirements are above and beyond our standard non-commercial usage policies, please contact us and tell us how we can help your business grow.
All of our Web Services are available for use up to the standard per-service rate limit in applications and web sites that comply with our Terms of Use. Many of our Web Services will allow certain kinds of business usage, but this can vary per-service. You can review our general Usage Policies for more information about what is permitted.
No. We do not charge for access to our Web Services. We make them available for free to you as-is, rate limited, and controlled by the relevant Terms of Use. You may use the services up to their individual standard daily rate limit (see the documentation for specifics) in applications that comply with our Usage Policies.
To access Yahoo! Web Services, we require that you register and use an application ID, which is tied to your application. Your application ID must be sent with each Web Services request. Your application also must also follow our Usage Policy and include attribution.
An Application ID is a string that uniquely identifies your application. Think of it like a User-Agent string. If you have multiple applications, you must use a different ID for each one. Get yours here.
Access is rate limited based on the caller's IP address, and queries are limited per IP and per day. Each service may have a different access rate limit. See the documentation for each service for more information. Circumvention of these rate limits by any means is expressly forbidden under our Terms of Use .
When a rate limit has been exceeded, the HTTP request will receive an error code of 403; along with a standard XML error response. See our rate limiting documentation for details.
You can request additional queries for your application via this form. However, not all requests can be approved at this time.
Each service may have different limits on the number of results returned by each query, as well as other variations in supported parameters. The documentation for each service specifies the default number and maximum number you can receive.
It is impossible for us to give you custom access to variations of our publicly available services. We cannot grant you more results, more parameters, more points or otherwise modify the behavior of the Web Services made available through Yahoo! Developer Network. However, we are interested in what you'd like to see in our APIs. You can use our registration form to describe your feature request or send email to the developer support mailing lists .
We support only the Web Services, APIs, and feeds launched officially on the Yahoo! Developer Network site. If you don't find the service or data you are interested in, it's not something we can make available at this time. However, by contacting us, you can cast your vote for this service and help us learn more about what tools will help you. We launch new stuff all the time, so don't give up hope! Your vote counts.
Please contact us if you would like to speak with someone about usage requirements beyond our standard non-commercial limitations. We would love to learn how Yahoo! can help your business succeed.
Some of our services are made available only for use in non-commercial applications. For those services, we are not able to place firm limits on what we consider "commercial use" because so many unforeseen uses are invented daily that we need to maintain a level of flexibility - especially while the program is free. That said, below are general examples of uses we consider to be commercial:
Developers can create applications that use our APIs and web services as work-for-hire for clients, however the usage within application itself must be approved.
Help is available on our developer support mailing lists hosted by Yahoo! Groups.
The best place to report bugs, outages or unexpected behavior is by posting to the developer support mailing lists for the Web Service in question.
We've built Yahoo! Gallery just to feature developers and their applications. To get started, create an account and add your application. Your application then is available to all the users of Yahoo! Gallery, searchable by technology and tag. Yahoo! Gallery can also help you keep track of usage and downloads. All user ratings of your application will increase your stature in the system - rolling up to a developer rating - perfect for independent developers. Check it out!
At this time we don't offer an API to access our driving direction data. For a workaround, you can generate a link to a Yahoo! Map from which you can easily click to driving directions. See this Yahoo! Maps help page for guidance in forming your query string. Our Embedded Maps APIs have more advanced functionality with more control over design, but no way to obtain driving direction or route information
REST stands for Representational State Transfer. Most of the Yahoo! Web Services use "REST-Like" RPC-style operations over HTTP GET or POST requests with parameters URL encoded into the request.
For more information about REST please check out the following:
The API for each service is versioned. When we need to change it or want to add functionality, we will release a new version of the API. Multiple versions of each API may coexist -- you'll use the version part of the API URL to specify which one you intend to access. See the versions documentation for more information.
You can use any language you like. Our SDK provides libraries and/or examples in various languages.
The SDK contains code and documentation to help you get started with the Yahoo! Search Web Services. There are libraries for accessing our services in Perl, Java, and Python, and code examples for JavaScript and PHP. Note that currently the SDK supports only the Yahoo! Search Web Services although the examples may be helpful for other Yahoo! Web Services has well.
To help you use Yahoo! Search APIs in your Flash applications, we have added a crossdomain.xml file to the top level of the Search Web Services directory. This should enable your Flash-based applications to retrieve data from the Web Services.
Not at this time. We may provide SOAP interfaces in the future, if there is significant demand. We believe REST has a lower barrier to entry, is easier to use than SOAP, and is entirely sufficient for these services.
Our services often provide two URLs for each result. The "display URL" leads directly to the site or resource in question. It's suitable for display in an application. The "click URL" is longer and contains extra information that helps us to optimize our search services.
Please use the click URL when sending users to a site as the result
of using our services. For example, <a href="$clickUrl">$displayUrl</a>
It's an encoding issue. You need to add <cfhttpparam type="Header" name="charset" value="utf-8" /> to your cfhttp call and it should work.
Copyright © 2008 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
Privacy Policy - Terms of Service - Copyright Policy - Job Openings