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Comment by Isofarro | Hacker News Reader

I'd be wary of touching any Yahoo API that isn't a core part of their business. Developer enthusiasm isn't enough considering how likely, when Yahoo run into difficulties, they'll just sunset APIs we're using.

I want to say the Search API is a good example of a core business proposition: there's a revenue stream there for the service, but the search results are probably from Bing, so although the Yahoo side looks like it has longevity, the reliance and licensing of search metadata from Microsoft is a dependency that ups the risk of using this API. I don't really trust Microsoft not to pull the carpet out from under us when they've collected a sufficient number of eyeballs to consider the second step of a bait and switch.

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If you're excluding search (and I think your reasoning is at least plausible), then what IS a core part of Yahoo's business?

News and email

Reorganizations?

They've made it clear that they're in the business of being a media company, not a technology company. So I would say that the media-focussed products like Tumblr are probably more reliable bets, but it also means that they're more likely to pivot based on unpredictable trends, rather than focus on any specific technological capability.

Yahoo is a holding company focused on large, category-leading sites in Asian markets. They also own a struggling portal in the US.

Ha! Like the old joke that McDonald's is a real estate company that sells hamburgers.

I thought yahoo were pretty good, hasn't YQL been running for donkeys? And YSlow. Or am I confusing it with another service. I'm sure I used it about 5 or 6 years ago.

YQL has been falling apart for years now. Sometimes it's down for me for over 48 hours.

YQL is one of my favorite Yahoo services, but I hesitate to use it in projects due to its unreliability / uncertain future. It would be great to have an open source clone that was deployable to Heroku or similar.

YQL runs a huge amount of the internal infrastructure at Yahoo. I'm surprised you saw it down for 48 hours unless you were blacklisted for abuse.

There is an open source clone from eBay that isn't quite the same: http://ql.io

Oh, I wasn't actually the poster who saw it down for 48 hours. I guess it's more that since YQL is accessing a bunch of external services there's a good possibility that something else was going on. As a 3rd party service it's a bit harder to debug, but that's just the nature of things.

ql.io looks interesting, I'll check it out.

YQL shouldn't be down for so long. It's likely that the underlying data source/API you were trying to access was down or your API key/IP address was blocked for exceeding rate limits.

I don't know how it works for outside developers, but I've discovered that they use it heavily for some of their own media projects including, for example, their video product Yahoo Screen. What that means for longevity is probably an open question.

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