Introduction

People love to perform local searches. Being able to quickly locate local businesses or local movie listings, find something for sale near them, check the weather, or get TV listings are all local items that people want to look up all the time.

We're also going to let people perform Google searches, grab stock market quotes, and retrieve the latest headlines. We are going to accomplish this using various APIs, such as Yahoo's YQL, Yahoo Weather, Yelp.com, Craigslist, Google, Yahoo Finance, and Yahoo News.

We will use Application Programming Interface (API); in fact, Twilio itself is an API and we've been using APIs all along. Why use APIs? The answer is pretty simple—you use APIs to gather information from other sources to build apps that are useful to your users.

What is YQL? Yahoo Query Language (YQL) is an API that lets us talk to other APIs in a method similar to SQL. We'll be using this to get the local weather, find local businesses, and also search for classifieds. You can...