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May 20, 2005

We're on the hunt for great uses of Y!Q...

Every few days I come across some cool new site, application, or hack made possible by Yahoo's RSS feeds and Web Service APIs. My current favorite is Yahoo! News Tag Soup which Havi recently wrote about. It's more evidence of the kind of innovation and creativity that emerges when you open things up a bit and let the world remix your data and services.

And the most amazing part is that the majority of hacks are built by people doing it just because they can. They're not selling anything--just hoping for a bit of recognition or trying to impress friends. (Oh, and a few might get job offers!)

Well, that gave us an idea... What if there was a concrete incentive to play with some of the stuff we've been building? Like maybe a cold, hard $5,000. That'd buy you a nice new Powerbook. Or a dozen iPods. Or a year's worth of unlimited music for 100 of your closest friends.

That's what the Y!Q Challenge is all about. Your job is to impress us with your use of Y!Q on your web site. Our job is to be impressed and fork over the cash.

What's Y!Q? It's an on-page contextual search DHTML widget that I wrote about at the time of the beta launch. In essence, it lets people search without leaving your web site.

The Y!Q Challenge FAQ and the legal blah blah are on the site, but all you really need to get started is your own web site and the ability to dig in to the HTML a bit. You do some pretty interesting things by hacking the CSS and using some of the advanced features list in the documentation.

Go ahead. Impress us.

Jeremy Zawodny
Yahoo! Search

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Comments

Can we please get a webservice that returns the results of the Y!Q query so that we don't have to parse them out of the HTML?

Posted by: jr | May 20, 2005 04:41 PM

Ah, nevermind. I found it.

Posted by: jr | May 20, 2005 04:43 PM

According to legal it is for US residents only.
Why is that ?

Posted by: Anatoly Lubarsky | May 23, 2005 04:42 PM

yeah, why only US-residents only? I know a lotta europeans able to do nice things with this.

Posted by: daniel | May 26, 2005 02:42 AM

Yeah, I was just about to enter until I saw the 'US Only' thing. Sigh. :(

Posted by: Dom Ramsey | May 26, 2005 02:03 PM

Yep, I would've considered it too if it wasn't US only.

Posted by: Daniel M | May 27, 2005 02:32 PM

The TOS for Y!Q kind of takes the fun out of this one....

"You may not remove, distort or alter any element of the Y!Q Tag (including the html code) or otherwise change the size or appearance of the Y!Q Tag in any way."

Not that I really expect to win any contest with my lowly javascript skills, but what gives?

Posted by: jeremy | May 29, 2005 07:12 AM

Sorry for the US-centric contest, but I suspect our lawyers aren't thrilled with the idea of trying to draft contest rules that work in every possible country.

Posted by: Jeremy Zawodny | May 31, 2005 09:49 AM

Clearly the TOS wasn't written with the contest in mind.

Posted by: Jeremy Zawodny | May 31, 2005 09:58 AM

Cool, I was figuring as much, but wanted to make sure before I spent more time on it... Thanks for the info.

Posted by: jeremy | May 31, 2005 12:27 PM

The Y!Q is great, but I'd *really* like to see an API for Yahoogroups. Copying links from one group to another is a real pain, and I'd be happy enough to write my own user-agent to do the task. But I got a very curt "Shouldn't you be somewhere else?" when trying to test posting. I can't even find a policy on this anywhere. If the TOS won't allow it, then I'll have to make a links page elsewhere and just post one link to it. But it'd be far better to use the existing yahoogroups links page.

Thanks!

Posted by: Craig A. Cook | June 1, 2005 06:56 AM

Is there an API for Yahoo Calendar? I've got everything I could find on the Yahoo Web Services API's and flickr API's. But I don't see an API for using Yahoo Calendar. Does one exist? If not, is there anything in the Yahoo TOS about not page scraping Yahoo Calendar to operate it programmatically?

Any other interesting API's I should know about?

Thanks,
Robert

http://www.robodance.com/
Robosapien Dance Machine
SourceForge Project Of The Month - May 2005

Posted by: Robert Oschler | June 1, 2005 09:49 PM

How do I find out what other API features are

Posted by: Richly Scented Candles | May 2, 2007 01:01 PM

It should be for everyone not just US residents only.

Posted by: Sterling Silver CZ Jewelry | May 2, 2007 01:02 PM

Very interesting feature!

Posted by: Decorative Throw Pillows | May 2, 2007 01:03 PM