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Getting Started

1. Get an Application ID

   To access data via the Yahoo! Developer Network, you will need to nail down an application ID of your very own. It's quick, free, and painless, and will help us enormously as we continue to expand our services.

2. Read the Fine Manual

   Relax, you're halfway done. Please finish this page, and then take a few more minutes to read up on each of the Answers Web Services that you're going to use.

3. New To the Developer Network?

   Please check out the Frequently Asked Questions. If you'd like to see some example code, go grab the Yahoo! Search Software Development Kit, which includes BSD-licensed examples and libraries for Perl, Python, PHP, Java, JavaScript, Flash, and more.

Answers Web Services

• questionSearch

  Find questions that match your query.

• getByCategory

  List questions from one of our hundreds of categories, filtered by type. You'll need the category name or ID, which you can get from questionSearch.

• getQuestion

  Found an interesting question? getQuestion lists all the details for every answer to the question ID you specify, including the best answer, if it's been chosen. Get that question ID from questionSearch or getByCategory.

• getByUser

  List questions from specific users on Yahoo! Answers. You'll need the user id, which you can get from any of the other services listed above.

Try It Now!

For best results, start with something simple like "cars" in questionSearch. Once you see some results, copy and paste the user ID, question ID, or category ID into the Find box, select the appropriate API, and you're off and running.

questionSearch (find text, like "cars") getQuestion (find question ID) getByCategory (find category ID) getByUser (find user ID) Find: Output: XMLJSONPHPRSS Go!

Rate Limit

Yahoo! Web Search Web Services are limited to 5,000 queries per IP per day per API. See information on rate limiting and our Usage Policy to learn about acceptable uses and how to request additional queries.

Additional Terms of Service

For reasons we hope are obvious, all Web sites and applications that present data from the Yahoo! Answers API must show the attribution "Powered by Yahoo! Answers".

While it's not strictly necessary, we'd consider it a personal favor if you linked the attribution back to the main Answers site, at answers.yahoo.com, so your readers can see what all the fuss is about. Thanks!

Built Something Cool? Please Share It in the Applications Gallery!

We'd love to see what you've come up with! To share your applications and find other examples of developer creativity, please visit the Yahoo! Applications Gallery. You'll be able to upload, download, rate, and review applications from all over the world, using all sorts of Yahoo! data and services.

Developer Support and Community

If you're building something cool with the Yahoo! Answers Web Services, please come join us for tea, crumpets, and highly technical discussion on the ydn-answers mailing list.

Important: if you need help with Yahoo! Answers and you're not a developer, joining ydn-answers is guaranteed not to work. The developers on ydn-answers are there to talk about building cutting-edge stuff using the Answers APIs, not about how to get your avatar to change to a custom picture, or how many more points you need to get to level 3. Please visit Yahoo! Answers Help for answers to these and other product-related questions. And if Help doesn't help, look for answers in Answers. (Yep, that's a full twisting double-meta-self-reference, degree of difficulty 4.9. Sweet, huh?)