Telling developers from users
Olivier thinks the way the Yahoo API limits queries by IP is a bit strange, which reminded me of what I realized while going to sleep last night: it’s actually very cool. With the Google API, if you distribute an app or build a web app, you have to tell your users to go sign up for a developers key and have them plug it in your app, but with Yahoo your app ID (which, nicely, you choose) tells Yahoo what app is calling, and the IP address tells them what user. Build something cool, and it might generate hundreds of thousands of queries per day, but they are “charged” to the users, not to the developer. (Plus, it’s nice that there’s some good to my dialup existence: if I mess up building something, and go over the limit, I just need to reconnect.)
Maybe I’m missing something but limiting it by IP won’t change anything for webapps right? On a webapp, the server itself will typically be doing the querying (unless it’s using a Java applet/ActiveX to offload the work to the client’s browser) so won’t the webserver be limited to 5000 queries no matter how many end users it’s serving to?
I can see how this would be good for applications distributed and run from the end user’s PC though.