Yahoo! Hacks

Track Additions to Yahoo!

Keep track of the number of sites added to your favorite Yahoo! categories.

Every day, a squad of surfers at Yahoo! adds new sites to the Yahoo! index. These changes are reflected in the Yahoo! What’s New page (http://dir.yahoo.com/new), along with the Picks of the Day.

If you’re a casual surfer, you might not care about the number of new sites added to Yahoo!. But there are several scenarios when you might have an interest:

You regularly glean information about new sites from Yahoo!

Knowing which categories are growing and which categories are stagnant will tell you where to direct your attention.

You want to submit sites to Yahoo!

Are you going to spend your hard-earned money adding a site to a category where new sites are added constantly (meaning your submitted site might quickly get buried)? Or will you be paying to add to a category that sees few additions (meaning your site might have a better chance of standing out)?

You’re interested in trend tracking

Which categories are consistently busy? Which are all but dead? By watching how Yahoo! adds sites to categories, over time you’ll get a sense of the rhythms and trends and detect when unusual activity occurs in a category.

This hack scrapes the recent counts of additions to Yahoo! categories and prints them out, providing an at-a-glance look at additions to various categories. You’ll also get a tab-delimited table of how many sites have been added to each category for each day. A tab-delimited file is excellent ...