OReilly yahoo hacks tips and tools for living on the web frontier oct 2005 ISBN 0596009453

new Web Services API and Perl, PHP, Java, Python, Ruby, or the programming language of your choice Visualize search results and topics, mash up images from around the Web, and remix othe

By Paul Bausch

Publisher: O'Reilly Pub Date: October 2005 ISBN: 0-596-00945-3 Pages: 489

Yahoo! Hacks shows you how to use, expand, personalize, and tweak Yahoo! in ways you

never dreamed possible You'll learn how to:

Fine-tune search queries with keyword shortcuts and advanced syntax

Manage and customize Yahoo! Mail, using it as your universal email client to access all your other accounts

Explore your social networks with Yahoo! 360, blogging your life, keeping up with friends, and making new contacts

Store, sort, blog, feed, track, and otherwise share photos with Flickr and RSS

Make My Yahoo! your Yahoo!, and personalize Yahoo!'s many properties

Roll your own Yahoo! applications with Yahoo! new Web Services API and Perl, PHP, Java, Python, Ruby, or the programming language of your choice

Visualize search results and topics, mash up images from around the Web, and remix other web content

List (or hide) your site with Yahoo!, and integrate Yahoo! Groups, Messenger,

contextual search (Y!Q), or other Yahoo! features

Whether you want to become a power searcher, news monger, super shopper, or

ever thought possible.

By Paul Bausch

Publisher: O'Reilly Pub Date: October 2005 ISBN: 0-596-00945-3 Pages: 489

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Table

Series Editor: Rael Dornfest Cover Designer: Hanna Dyer

Executive Editor: Dale Dougherty Interior Designer: David Futato

While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of thisbook, the publisher and author assume no responsibility for

errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use ofthe information contained herein

Small print: The technologies discussed in this publication, the

limitations on these technologies that technology and contentowners seek to impose, and the laws actually limiting the use ofthese technologies are constantly changing Thus, some of thehacks described in this publication may not work, may causeunintended harm to systems on which they are used, or maynot be consistent with applicable user agreements Your use ofthese hacks is at your own risk, and O'Reilly Media, Inc

disclaims responsibility for any damage or expense resultingfrom their use In any event, you should take care that your use

of these hacks does not violate any applicable laws, includingcopyright laws

This book uses RepKover™, a durable and flexible lay-flatbinding

ISBN: 0-596-00945-3

[C]

About the AuthorContributors

Acknowledgments

(Wiley), and maintains a directory of Oregon weblogs calledORblogs (http://www.orblogs.com) When he's not working on abook, Paul posts thoughts and photos to his personal weblog,

onfocus (http://www.onfocus.com)

Lublin, Poland, with his wife, Gosia, and can be reached atjacek@artymiak.com

Bonnie Biafore is the author of several books about personalfinance, investing, and project management As an

engineer, she's tenaciously attentive to detail and digeststantalizing morsels about every topic she approaches Hersick sense of humor turns subjects that are droolinducing inother books into entertaining, easy reading Her book the

NAIC Stock Selection Handbook won major awards from

both the Society of Technical Communication and APEX

Awards for Publication Excellence, but she cherishes theraves she's received from beginning investors most of all

She is also the author of Online Investing Hacks (O'Reilly) and QuickBooks 2005: The Missing Manual (O'Reilly).

Bonnie writes a monthly column called WebWatch for Better

Investing magazine and is a regular contributor to

WomensWallStreet.com As a consultant, she manages

projects for clients and wins accolades for her ability to herdcats When not chained to her computer, she hikes in themountains with her dogs, cooks gourmet meals, and

practices saying no to additional work assignments You canlearn more at Bonnie's web site,

http://www.bonniebiafore.com, or email her at

bonnie.biafore@gmail.com

(http://www.researchbuzz.com), a weekly newsletter onInternet searching and online information resources She'salso a regular columnist for Searcher magazine She's beenwriting about search engines and searching since 1996; her

imagine (like the popular open sourced syndicated readerAmphetaDesk, the best-kept gaming secret

Gamegrene.com, the popular Ghost Sites and NonsenseNetwork, the giggle-inducing articles at the O'Reilly

Network, a few pieces at Apple's Internet Developer site,etc.), he's an ardent supporter of cloning, merely so he canget more work done He cooks with a Fry Pan of Intellect+2 and lives in Concord, New Hampshire

Ryan Kennedy is a software engineer at Yahoo!, working onYahoo! Mail In his spare time, he maintains the Yahoo! JavaSearch SDK

Philipp Lenssen lives in Stuttgart, Germany, where he blogsabout Google, works as a programmer on an automobileweb site, and eats spicy Thai food with his girlfriend Helikes to ponder future technology and jump on any

technology bandwagon that seems worthwhile, especially allthe APIs that make a developer's life that much easier

Philipp's daily musings can be found at court.com

http://blog.outer-Mikel Maron is an independent software developer and

ecologist He has built several geographic-oriented projects

My Yahoo! in the pre-RSS days Mikel was awarded a

master's degree from the University of Sussex for building asimulation of the evolution of complexity in food webs

Originally from California, Mikel is presently based mostly inBrighton, United Kingdom, with his wife, Anna Links to

various things can be found at http://brainoff.com

Deepak Nadig is an entrepreneur and has helped build

innovative and useful products for 14 years He is currentlytaking a break after cofounding and selling Covigna, a

pioneer in Contract Lifecycle Management

Todd Ogasawara focuses on Mobile Workforce and MobileLifestyle technology, paying special attention to the

Microsoft Windows Mobile platform (Pocket PC and

Smartphone) Microsoft has recognized his demonstratedpractical expertise and willingness to share his experience

by recognizing him as a Microsoft Most Valuable

Professional (MVP) in the Mobile Devices category since

2000 His other technology focus is in the effort to bringcommercial (especially Microsoft-related) products and

GNU/Open Source software together in a synergistic andproductive way Todd has written several articles about

mobile devices, digital cameras, and the Apple Mac Mini forthe O'Reilly Network He previously worked as a technologyanalyst for GTE/Verizon He also served as the contractedforum manager for the MSN.com (and later ZDNet)

Telephony Forum and Windows CE Forum More recently, hehas served as the eGovernment team leader for the State ofHawaii You can find his Mobile Workforce and Lifestyle

commentary at http://www.MobileViews.com You can learnmore about Eccentric Technology at

http://www.OgasaWalrus.com You can reach Todd by email

at Hacks@OgasaWalrus.com

is a husband and father who lives in North Carolina with hiswife, his son, and his dog Mark spends his copious free

time sunbathing, skydiving, and reading Immanuel Kant's

Critique of Pure Reason in the original Klingon He can be

found stirring up trouble at http://diveintomark.org

Premshree Pillai is a geek working at Yahoo! He loves Ruby,beer, and classic rock He blogs at

http://www.livejournal.com/users/premshree

Eric Ries is currently CTO of IMVU, a startup creating 3-D,avatarbased instant messaging Eric also serves, in a

volunteer capacity, as CTO of the Taproot Foundation

Previously, he was senior software engineer at There andcofounder and CTO of Catalyst Recruiting He is author ofseveral free software projects, most recently the peer-to-peer RPC system Kenosis, and coauthor of several books,

including The Black Art of Java Game Programming and

Mastering Java.

Alan Taylor has been a web developer for over 10 years andhas worked for Monster.com, MSNBC.com, and

Amazon.com He builds web projects (such as Amazon

Light; http://kokogiak.com/amazon) and web hacks/toys on

an irregular basis, most of which can be found at

http://kokogiak.com Alan believes that open APIs are yourfriends and are positively the best trend on the Internet inyears

To my wife, Shawnde, thanks for the continuous feedback andfrontline editing, and for cheerfully discussing Yahoo! duringbreakfast, lunch, dinner, and every spare moment in between

Many thanks go to Brian Sawyer for providing direction and

encouragement, and for fine-tuning the text

checking facts, and adding important points to the technicaldetails

Thanks to tech editor Steve Champeon for testing code, double-Thanks to Morbus Iff for taking my Perl to task and simplifyingthe confusing bits

Finally, thanks to everyone at Yahoo! who contributed tips andhack ideas, including Vijay Anisetti, Stig Sæther Bakken, DaveBrown, Aurora Casanova, David Dueblin, Jennifer Dulski, MarcusFoster, David Hall, Jason B Silverstein, Jeremy Zawodny, andmany anonymous Yahoos Thanks also to Chris Kalaboukis andBernard Mangold at Yahoo! Research for lending a hand

Yahoo! is an impressive example of what can happen when ahobby takes on a life of its own In 1994, Jerry Yang and DavidFilo began publishing a personal list of sites they found

interesting on the emerging World Wide Web As "Jerry's Guide

to the World Wide Web" grew larger, the two Stanford grad

students began organizing the sites into categories, and thebasic structure of today's Yahoo! Directory was born By late

1994, they chose to rename their directory after the word

yahoo because its original definition describing a crude, rude

person appealed to the pair's subversive natures (And as truecomputer geeks, they turned Yahoo! into an acronym for YetAnother Hierarchical Officious Oracle.) Figure P-1 is a look atthe Yahoo! home page from December 1994

Yahoo! looks very different today Figure P-2 shows the morefamiliar Yahoo! home page of 2005

Though the two Yahoo! home pages look radically different, theoriginal idea of taming the chaos of the World Wide Web andmaking it accessible to a wider audience remains According totheir vision statement, Yahoo! wants "to enable people to find,use, share, and expand all human knowledge." The goal of

furthering this vision, nicknamed FUSE (for "find, use, share,and expand"), can be found in every acquisition Yahoo! makesand every product Yahoo! releases Yahoo! has localized

versions of its offerings in dozens of countries, and the Yahoo!brand is recognized around the world Over the past 10 years,Yahoo! has become much more than a guide to the Web;

Yahoo! is a platform for visualizing and connecting with the

world

Many Yahoo! features are familiar to anyone who uses the Web.Millions of people use Yahoo! Search to find information on theWeb Millions more use Yahoo! Groups to share information and

Figure I-1 Yahoo! in 1994

Over the past year, the FUSE philosophy has been a distinctfeature of Yahoo!'s newest services In February 2005, Yahoo!

of friends In April 2005, Yahoo! introduced My Web, a way tosave and share search results while creating your own personalcategorized directory of the Web

This book aims to help you FUSE Yahoo! features and services

by introducing you to little-known corners of Yahoo!, by

reintroducing you to familiar Yahoo! services, and by showingyou examples of the many ways people are expanding Yahoo!

on their own Though the hacks might be crude and rude attimes, they're written in the same spirit of sharing somethinginteresting that inspired the creation of Yahoo! in the first place

Figure I-2 Yahoo! in 2005

The term hacking has a bad reputation in the press They use it

to refer to someone who breaks into systems or wreaks havocwith computers as their weapon Among people who write code,

While Yahoo! itself has been around for over 10 years, it is

releasing new applications, web sites, and software at a blindingpace This book isn't intended to catalog everything Yahoo!

offers, but rather to introduce new technologies, such as Yahoo!Web Services, while showing novel ways to use perennial

offerings like Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Mail, and Yahoo! Groups.Through the years, developers have scraped, poked, and

prodded every corner of Yahoo! for their own uses, and the

release of Yahoo! Web Services is like a welcome mat being putout for a wider audience of would-be hackers This book intends

to show you what's possible when you view Yahoo! as a

platform and inspire your inner hacker to take a new look atYahoo!

You can read this book from cover to cover if you like, but eachhack stands on its own, so feel free to browse and jump to thedifferent sections that interest you most If there's a

prerequisite you need to know about, a cross-reference willguide you to the right hack

Running a hack on the command line invariably involves thefollowing steps:

1 Type the program into a garden-variety text editor: Notepad

on Windows, TextEdit on Mac OS X, vi or Emacs on

Unix/Linux, or anything else of the sort Save the file as

directedusually as scriptname.pl (the pl bit stands for Perl, the predominant programming language used in Yahoo!

Hacks).

Alternately, you can download the code for all of the hacksonline at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/yahoohks, wherethere is a ZIP archive containing individual scripts saved astext files

2 Get to the command line on your computer or remote

server In Mac OS X, launch the Terminal (Applications

Utilities Terminal) In Windows, click the Start button,select Run…, type command, and hit the Enter/Return key onyour keyboard In Unix…well, we'll just assume you knowhow to get to the command line

3 Navigate to where you saved the script at hand This varies

from operating system to operating system, but usually

2 "Much Ado About Nothing Script" [http://www.signal42.com/much_ado_ about_nothing_script.asp]

The elllpsis (…) bit signifies that we've cut offthe output for brevity's sake

safekeeping, importing into your spreadsheet application, ordisplaying on your web site This is as easy as:

Don't worry if you can't remember all of this; each command-CGI Scripts

CGI scriptsprograms that run on your web site and produce

pages dynamicallyare a little more complicated if you're not

used to them While fundamentally they're the same sorts of

troublesome because setups vary so widely You might be

running your own server, your web site might be hosted on anInternet service provider's (ISP's) server, your content mightlive on a corporate intranet serveror anything in between

Since going through every possibility is beyond the scope of this(or any) book, you should check your ISP's knowledge base, orcall the ISP's technical support department, or ask your localsystem administrator for help

2 Move the script over to wherever your web site lives You

should have some directory on a server somewhere in

which all of your web pages (all those html files) and

images (ending in jpg, gif, etc.) live Within this directory, you'll probably see something called a cgi-bin directory: this

Unix/Linux or Mac OS X system, this usually entails typingthe following on the command line:

$ chmod 755 scriptname.cgi

4 Now you should be able to point your web browser at the

script and have it run as expected, behaving in a mannersimilar to that described in the "Running the Hack" section

of the hack at hand

Just what URL you use, once again, varies widely It should,however, look something like

be a little more than the average newbie can bear, but there ishelp in the form of a famous frequently asked question (FAQ)archive: "The Idiot's Guide to Solving Perl CGI Problems."

Search for it and step through as directed

Learning to Code

best-selling Learning Perl

(http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/lperl3), by Randal L Schwartzand Tom Phoenix, provides a good start Apply what you learn

to understanding and using the hacks in this book, perhapseven taking on the "Hacking the Hack" sections to tweak andfiddle with the scripts This is a useful way to get a little

programming under your belt if you're a searching nut, sinceit's always a little easier to learn how to program when youhave a task to accomplish and existing code to leaf through

The book is divided into several chapters, organized by subject:

Chapter 1, Search

This chapter shows you how to become a Yahoo! powersearcher by taking advantage of meta keywords to returnmore relevant results You'll also see how to use searchshortcuts to find instant answers to some common

questions This chapter tells you how to find popular searchphrases and technologies by analyzing Yahoo! Buzz, andwe'll pit Yahoo! against Google to see which search enginereturns the most relevant results

Chapter 2, Services

Yahoo! offers information about everything from stocks andbonds to movie and TV schedules This chapter shows someunique ways to use Yahoo! Web Services, including

monitoring your commute for problems, watching TV

schedules automatically for appearances by your favoritecelebrities, and visualizing your music collection

Chapter 3, Communicating

Use the hacks in this chapter to reach out and touch

someone You'll find hacks for managing your Yahoo! Mail,collaborating with Yahoo! Groups, and exploring your socialnetworks with Yahoo! 360 This chapter also shows someways to personalize Yahoo! Messenger and share your

Chapter 4, Web Services

This chapter introduces you to the back door that Yahoo!has opened for developers You'll find bare-bones examples

Chapter 6, Webmastering

If you publish on the Web, you're well aware of the trafficYahoo! can send to your site This chapter shows how to getlisted and introduces you to other Yahoo! components youcan plug into your site

The following is a list of the typographical conventions used inthis book:

Italics

Used to indicate URLs, filenames, filename extensions, anddirectory names For example, a path in the filesystem will

a command-line prompt

Constant width italic

Used in code examples and other excerpts to show sampletext to be replaced with your own values

Used to indicate a cross-reference within the text

A carriage return ( ) at the end of a line of code is used todenote an unnatural line break; that is, you should not enterthese as two lines of code, but as one continuous line Multiplelines are used in these cases due to page-width constraints

You should pay special attention to notes set apart from thetext with the following icons:

This is a tip, suggestion, or general note It contains useful supplementary information about the topic at hand.

This is a warning or note of caution, often indicating that your money

or your privacy might be at risk.

The thermometer icons, found next to each hack, indicate therelative complexity of the hack:

beginner moderate expert

This book is here to help you get your job done In general, youmay use the code in this book in your programs and

documentation You do not need to contact us for permissionunless you're reproducing a significant portion of the code Forexample, writing a program that uses several chunks of codefrom this book does not require permission Selling or

distributing a CD-ROM of examples from O'Reilly books does

require permission Answering a question by citing this bookand quoting example code does not require permission

Incorporating a significant amount of example code from this

book into your product's documentation does require

permission

We appreciate, but do not require, attribution An attributionusually includes the title, author, publisher, and ISBN For

example: "Yahoo! Hacks by Paul Bausch Copyright 2006

O'Reilly Media, Inc., 0-596-00945-3."

If you feel your use of code examples falls outside fair use orthe permission given above, feel free to contact us at

permissions@oreilly.com

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We have tested and verified the information in this book to thebest of our ability, but you may find that features have changed(or even that we have made mistakes!) As a reader of this

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Please also let us know what we can do to make this book moreuseful to you We take your comments seriously and will try toincorporate reasonable suggestions into future editions You canwrite to us at:

To explore Hacks books online or to contribute a hack for futuretitles, visit:

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Hack 12 Streamline Browsing with the Yahoo! ToolbarHack 13 Customize the Firefox Quick Search Box

Hack 14 Spot Trends with Yahoo! Buzz

Hack 15 Find Hot Technologies at the Buzz GameHack 16 Tame Long Yahoo! URLs

Hack 17 Opt Out of Advertiser Cookies

Many of us use search engines in the same way we we use

street signs We use them to navigate, to get our bearings, and

to pinpoint our destination We rarely stop to consider the signsthemselves or look for more information they might be telling

us As with street signs, we'd be lost without search engines,and by taking a few minutes to contemplate the Yahoo! WebSearch results page, you might find new ways to reach yourdestination

Take a look at Figure 1-1, which shows a Yahoo! Web Searchresults page for the query ancient greece

Figure 1-1 Yahoo! Web Search results

Navigation bar

You'll find the gray navigation bar at the top of the page onmany pages at Yahoo! sites The bar provides a consistentway to get to the main Yahoo! page

(http://www.yahoo.com), the My Yahoo! portal [Hack

#34], and Yahoo! Mail [Hack #52] The bar also indicatesyour login status by displaying your Yahoo! ID [Hack #3]

or Guest, along with links that let you sign in to Yahoo! or

sign out You can also click the Help link at the far right ofthe navigation bar to read documentation about the site

Search links

Just above the search form, you'll find links to other Yahoo!searches, including Images, Video [Hack #11], the Yahoo!Directory [Hack #20], Yahoo! News [Hack #32], andYahoo! Shopping [Hack #47] You can click any of thesesearch links to search with the exact query you used at one

of the other Yahoo! Search properties so that you don'thave to retype your search term

Result count

Search results are returned as a number of pages, and