As far as Yahoo's search API (BOSS) is concerned, their product management has been helpful and straightforward to communicate with. They allowed us to bend the TOS our way and approved a special use case.
Nice! I wrote a .NET wrapper myself, never got around to a Python extension though. One question - did you experience any memory leak issues with the CLD? Said, .NET wrapper DLL seems to leak and I never really checked if it was the C++/CLI I added on top or the actual CLD native C++ code. I doubt the latter since (according to my basic understanding) nothing is created in the original code which needs to be cleaned up manually. Before I start debugging mixed-mode .NET applications I just wanted to be sure.
I agree. I've used eventlet, a concurrent networking module for Python made by Linden Lab I believe. It was cool to see how helpful the developers are to answer your questions on IRC. It helped me a lot with my project.
I've been dabbling in content-scraping, what bugs me is that with all the AJAX trickery that's going on, merely analyzing the XHTML source doesn't get you very far in many cases. Executing the page (JS, DOM and all) via browser-programming is an option but of course quite expensive. A headless browser is what's needed!
Chromium has a "Network" Tab in its development tools. In Chrome I cannot find it. Is there a way to bring it up? Why was it even removed (hidden) like that?
... easy, benchmarking your own algos against the prediction API on large-scale data sets. I presume that's what 90% of the people who received their account during testing did anyway :-D I did 15k requests in about 10mins at times.