Yahoo! Hacks: Tips & Tools for Living on the Web Frontier

by Paul Bausch

Yahoo took the world by storm in the 1990s as a one-of-a-kind, searchable list of interesting web sites. But ten years later, it has expanded into a department store overflowing with useful and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0596009453
• ISBN13: 9780596009458
• Release Date: November 2005
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Length: 496 Pages
• Weight: 1.39 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.1" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

YAHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!: THE FINAL FRONTIER OF HACKS

If you're not very knowledgeable on how to use, expand, personalize, and tweak Yahoo!, this book is for you! Author Paul Bausch, has done an outstanding job of writing a book that will help you do just that, in ways you never dreamed possible. Bausch, begins by showing you how to become a Yahoo! power searcher by taking advantage of meta keywords in order to return more relevant results. Then, he shows you some unique ways on how to use Yahoo! Web Services, including monitoring your commute for problems, watching TV schedules automatically for appearances by your favorite celebrities, and visualizing your music collection. The author continues by showing you how to use the hacks to reach out and touch someone. Next, he introduces you to the backdoor that Yahoo! has opened for developers. Then, the author shows you how people are using Yahoo! data in their own applications and have a bit of fun in the process. Finally, he shows you how to get listed and introduces you to other Yahoo! components you can plug into your site. You can read this excellent book from cover to cover if you like, but each hack stands on its own. Here, the author intends to show you what's possible when you view Yahoo! as a platform and inspire your inner hacker to take a new look at Yahoo!.

Everything to know about tweaking Yahoo! is here

Paul Bausch's YAHOO! HACKS: TIPS & TOOLS FOR LIVING ON THE WEB FRONTIER tells how to personalize and use Yahoo! In new ways, from using keyword shortcuts and advanced syntax to get more from search queries to customizing Yahoo! Mail, using its blogging features and file share programs, and even building applications using Yahoo! web services. Everything there is to know about customizing and tweaking Yahoo! is in this book.

How to get the most out of Yahoo.

This book contains a hundred hacks to get Yahoo to work the way you want it to work. These hacks include tips for getting the results you want from a Yahoo search, dealing with advertiser cookies, tracking your stocks, getting news feeds and news crawlers, using Yahoo groups, programming Yahoo using various languages including Perl, Java, PHP, and VBScript and even how to plot multiple points on map at the same time. Of course the biggest question for many people is how to get your site listed at Yahoo and there is even a tip for that. Yahoo! Hacks is a highly recommended book to anyone who uses Yahoo or wants to know how to really master it.

I'm not dead yet!

"The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." That quote might apply to Yahoo when you look at all the mindshare that Google has garnered of late. It's almost as if Yahoo is irrelevant and Google owns the search world. Not quite, and Paul Bausch's new book Yahoo! Hacks - Tips & Tools for Living on the Web Frontier reminded me of all the good and incredibly valuable things you can do with Yahoo... Contents: Search; Services; Communicating; Web Services; Applications; Webmastering; Index Like all Hacks titles, you have a number of cool tips and tricks that you can do using Yahoo as your technology starting point. In this case, there's 100 of them that cover a wide range of topics. For instance, tip #39 - Monitor Your Commute shows how Yahoo can provide updated traffic conditions overlaying a map of your driving commute. Even better, those traffic updates can be formatted in RSS and put on your My Yahoo page. I did that one right away. Tip #83 - Randomize Your Windows Desktop Background shows how, using Yahoo's web services API and some VBA code, you can create a random Windows wallpaper each day. Just hope you don't choose a search term that isn't "work safe". :) The whole Web Services chapter shows how you can access Yahoo's API using a variety of languages such as Perl, PHP, Python and a few others. Once you get the basic core structure down, you open up a whole universe of possibilities in terms of programmatic integration of Yahoo into your applications. This is really cool stuff... I've been just as guilty as the next person of getting all "Google"-y eye'd at other search engines and forgetting the site that opened up a whole world of internet realities. Many of the things we take for granted now were ground-breaking ideas that Yahoo was pushing in the early days. Having two strong competitors in the search arena will lead to even more innovative thinking as they play off of each other. I can see how the Yahoo! Hacks title could go into multiple editions without even trying... Excellent read with lots of code you can use immediately. If you've wandered away from Yahoo for other pastures, perhaps it's time to wander back and see what other options are out there. Yahoo Hacks will expand your thinking as to what you can do with search engines...