Yahoo Pipes – A free customizable data aggregator and manipulator

Posted on August 9, 2007 at 7:58 am

Though Yahoo Pipes has been out for some time now, I never really played around with the service until yesterday. Pipes is a interactive way to browse multiple data sources, manipulate those sources with modules, and generate content you would otherwise not get from a normal search engine. It’s basically a giant mashup of your favorite online data sources, such as YouTube, NYTimes, del.icio.us, etc.

The coolest thing about the service is not that it simply aggregates data from multiple sources, but that you can configure the pipes or even create your own pipes to get the exact data you want. The whole pipe concept may take a little while to get used to, but once you create you own pipe, you’ll understand why this service is very unique. For example, there is a pipe that extracts the headlines from NYTimes.com and then sends that to YouTube to find new videos relating to that headline! Check it out. Pretty cool!

This is also great for anyone who subscribes to lots and lots of feeds because you can create you own ultimate customized feed with filters and sorting capabilities. Creating your own customized pipe, for example, you can grab the feeds from your favorite finance web sites and put a filter to display only the news about “Apple” or a particular ticker symbol. No longer would you have to visit three web sites or simply read one news source!

You can check out other cool pipes such as the Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit, and Slashdot mashup, which lets you customize what gets displayed by minimum number of Diggs, minimum number of Slashdot comments, and the number of popular del.icio.us and Reddit items.

Creating your own pipe is not as hard as it may seem. You can also create a new pipe by cloning another pipe! So if you like the pipe I just mentioned, but wish it included StumbleUpon favorites too, go ahead and click Clone and add another data feed to it.

Each pipe has it’s own unique URL, so it can easily be shared with family and friends. Once you share it out, others can improve it or customize it by cloning it. You can click on Documentation to learn how to create you own pipe in the Pipe Editor interface. It’s mostly dragging and dropping modules that perform specific tasks like fetching feed data, sorting, filtering, etc.

Another cool pipe is Apartment Near Something, which uses Craigslist and Yahoo!Local to find apartments near specific landmarks like parks, stadiums, hospitals, hotels, etc. This is an example of a customer vertical search that is currently impossible with ordinary search. Enjoy!

[tags] yahoo pipes, vertical search, customized search, search mashup, custom search engine, data aggregator, personalized search[/tags]

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One Response to “Yahoo Pipes – A free customizable data aggregator and manipulator”

Find local concerts and gigs from music in your iTunes library Says:

[...] movement. You can see a few examples of this type of Web 3.0 technology today with such services as Yahoo Pipes and Microsoft Popfly. Using Yahoo Pipes, for example, you can enter your LastFM user name and it [...]
October 10th, 2007 at 9:15 am