The web is your own personal database. All the information is out there, you simply need an efficient way to access it. YQL is the Yahoo Query Language and goes a long way toward bring your data directly to you in a well structured format.
So how do you get started in YQL and do you need to be a programmer? Let's start here: try grabbing some stock quotes. Sure, it looks a little imposing with angle brackets and keyword tags, but play around with it -- test it, give it a go.
Yes, the data is out there and someone might already have your data in a YQL table -- check it out.
The old way of downloading web information used what is called a screen scrapper or some other form of parsing the HTML from a web page. The problem here, if the web page changes, the data access is broken. Or you could grab a spreadsheet like format, like the Yahoo stock quotes in CSV format and use a programming environment like the Windows .NET framework to parse the data in a proprietary fashion.
Now you can get the stock data using a standard YQL approach.
Other sources of information:
- Gurchet-rai.net
- YQL on StackOverflow
- Andy Edinborough's Post
- Jarloo here and here.
- And the old way on CodeProject.
