Yahoo! Answers: Your Pipeline to the Global Brain

Tap into the collective knowledge of millions of Yahoo! users with the Yahoo! Answers web services APIs. Search for expert advice on any topic, from within your very own site. Watch for new questions in the Answers categories of your choice. Keep track of fresh content from your favorite Answers experts, and more!

How Do I Get 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. Review the Overview
   

   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. 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.

Using the Answers API

Overview

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 Limits

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.

Terms of Use

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!

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?)