This is yet another lesson for lazy or naive webmasters that build their sites around the services provided by third parties (mostly by Google in these days).

The first (and so far only one) comment on that site is sad, but funny. Yahoo can choose when to close it, that much is clear.

The most amusing part is it probably requires no maintenance to leave the API function as-is.

This sounds like it's being cut as part of some 3rd party deal without any regard to how existing customers might use it as part of their online store.

Typical, especially from a dying giant desperate for cash.

The Yahoo! Shopping API is/was a really good product, too. Well designed, with massive amounts of excellent data. One of the best data API's out there, IMHO - I've often used it as an example when teaching others about APIs and XML.

I have several apps out there that depend on it, and projects in development that also rely on it. All those projects will be scrapped.

Doesn't pg have an API?

No API for pricegrabber. People would just use it to scrape the data. They go out of their way to try and obfuscate their price / product /merchant data as well. Too bad, as they could really provide some amazing services with an open API and allow publishers to better monetize the data so there is no incentive to scrape it.

And there is nothing 'lazy' about leveraging 3rd party data sources to power your application. Isn't that essentially what a search engine does?

there is nothing 'lazy' about leveraging 3rd party data sources to power your application

Nope.

It's not Lazy, it's Naive.

It's naive to think the 3rd party tools will remain in operation or free, especially when your business depends on them, which is the case with httpwebwitch, and their business no longer does and they throw you and everyone else that bought into their API under the bus.

incrediBILL is likely right - this was more about a profit-making deal, than reducing maintenance costs.

I think it's a shame to see it go.

Might've been good to see their deal-making made invisible and non-impactful to websites using that service. What if, as part of the deal, Yahoo and Pricegrabber had integrated on the backend to allow everything to continue working as-is, without major intervention by many developers? I'd imagine there could've been a way to do that.

As it is, I'd bet they'll lose a significant amount of applications using it. I wonder how many companies which were using Yahoo's api let go of developers that built the api integrations during the economic woes of the past couple of years? There might not be anyone left at those companies with the time and know-how to transition to a new api. Once broken, they may opt not to change and just focus on various Google integrations.

Thankfully (and sensibly), the *core* functionality of my apps does not depend on this API. Only one feature is doomed - the one that lets people browse through Yahoo's kajillion products to find neat stuff. Sad that I'll have to remove it.

Why do you have to kill it? Why not use the amazon api which is really nice. Bing also has an api now. Or use a combo of amazon /cj / linkshare apis. There are still very decent product data api services out there. Best buy has a good one. Google still hasn't released an api for their affiliate program but you can get product data feeds for their biggest merchants. Ebay has a good one.

This decision has to be coming from microsoft. Why kill that api and not any others?

Since you will have to sign up for PG to get listed in the "new" Yahoo shopping, I suspect that a lot of merchants will drop it, since the PPC rates for Price Grabber are almost double the Yahoo rates.