Yahoo Pipes

A couple of fun behind the scenes stories which I think at this point are past the statute of limitations. Source: I was the Service Engineer on pipes for around a year or so. 1) When you went to the pipes landing page, there were a few demo pipes to show people what was possible. One of them combined search results from say ebay/craiglist/amazon to show prices for things. One day I was looking through the source of these, and…

Another fun story: For the longest time the Yahoo pipes front page had an example pipe that merged search results from various online sites (amazon/ebay/cl). It was made by a former employee and was easily one of the most popular pipes. One day we found out he had his affiliate id in all of those links. We chuckled and moved on[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9661133

I miss when Yahoo was really cool. Even long after it was made irrelevant, it had some of the best freely available public data APIs on the web. I remember in college, one of our first programming projects was to create a "weather website" (this was before everything was an "app"). The project instructions suggested we use the Yahoo weather API, and it blew my mind that anyone could just make a http GET request and instantly get back some…