Developers often ask what it would take for us to offer a Web Service API to Yahoo! Search. Often times they wanted to incorporate our services into an application or web site they were building. Before today I always had to give vague non-committal answers. In reality we were already working on it.

But rather than simply release a set of APIs that expose all of our "vertical" searches (web, image, video, news, and local), we thought about what it would take to create an ecosystem around these services. We quickly realized that building a real community around them was the way to go.

The best way to do that was to create the community site that we're calling the Yahoo! Search Developer Network or developer.yahoo.com. It has all the features you might expect from a modern software development community site:

• Documentation
• FAQs
• Mailing Lists
• Wiki
• Weblog
• SDK
• Application List

There's more information about the site availabe in the first YSDN weblog posting.

This is really just the beginning for our Developer Network. As we launch additional search products, you'll also see us release matching Yahoo! Web Service APIs.

It's worth noting that we already have APIs for our search advertising programs. They've been around for years.

Go forth and code. After you've built a cool application, tell us about it. We'd love to feature it on the site.

Jeremy Zawodny
Technical Yahoo!