An Introduction to YQL

What is YQL?

The Yahoo! Query Language is an expressive SQL-like language that lets you query, filter, and join data across Web services. With YQL, apps run faster with fewer lines of code and a smaller network footprint.

Yahoo! and other websites across the Internet make much of their structured data available to developers, primarily through Web services. To access and query these services, developers traditionally endure the pain of locating the right URLs and documentation to access and query each Web service. With YQL, developers can access and shape data across the Internet through one simple language, eliminating the need to learn how to call different APIs.

What Are YQL Tables?

Like SQL, YQL relies on tables to access data. The YQL Web Service uses the API defined in the tables to access data. As a YQL user, you don't need to know the API of the underlying Web Service that YQL is getting the data from or the response format. YQL gives you a standard API to access data returned in a standard response format. Once you understand the API and response format, you can get and parse data from a wide range of Yahoo! Web services and access off-network data.