Yahoo Frequently Asked Questions

    Yahoo Usage

  1. What is Yahoo?
  2. How does someone get his/her information listed in Yahoo?
  3. What kinds of bugs should be reported to Yahoo?
  4. What should I do if I click on a link and get 'Permission Denied', or 'File not found'?
  5. Why can't I read usenet news in Yahoo?
  6. I like the GIFs used in Yahoo. Can i get the gifs? How do i get gifs?

    Yahoo Technical Info

  7. What do you use to make the menubar?
  8. How do you make the Yahoo imagemap context sensitive?
  9. How do you make the Yahoo email and add form interfaces? <--! Removed by Correct v2.0 by Kutsal Berberoglu --> How are links gathered for the Yahoo database?
  10. What is the system set up for Yahoo?
If your question is not answered here, feel free to email the Yahoo authors.
  1. What is Yahoo?
    Yahoo is a hierarchical subject-oriented catalogue for the World Wide Web and Internet. A help file for using Yahoo can be found here.

  2. How does someone get his/her information listed in Yahoo?
    <--! Removed by Correct v2.0 by Kutsal Berberoglu --> Yahoo is a database of links to other sites Yahoo does not provide any original content, so we can only put references to sites that already exist.

    To get listed, you must set up a page on the World Wide Web. If you don't know what that means, please have a look at the WWW FAQ, which talks about how to write a home page in HTML, and find a WWW server to serve your document (Section 5 of the FAQ).

    Once you have a URL of something that you think we should add, please check first to make sure that we do not already have it. The easiest way to check is to search for the URL that you want to add. If we do not have it (or if we have it in the incorrect place), inform us using Yahoo's add interface.

  3. What kinds of bugs should be reported to Yahoo?
    Since we have no control of what other people put on their servers, do not ask us to change contents on pages that do not reside on Yahoo. Any URLs that do not contain akebono.Stanford.edu in its path is NOT on Yahoo. For bugs involving contents on other pages, please contact its page authors.

    Please report errors to us if a link has been relocated, or disappeared, permission denied, or if we have made errors in the title, comments, URL, or classification of the link.

  4. What should I do if I click on a link and get 'Permission Denied', or 'File not found'?
    When you follow a link and you get errors, there may be several reasons. First, the site may be busy or temporarily down. This happens alot especially on overloaded sites such as ftp.netcom.com. It may be that the site is denying people access. In which case, if you really want access, please write email to the site authors (usually webmaster@sitename). Of course it may be that the link no longer exists.

    If you think that a link no longer exists, please inform us and we'll remove it from our directory.

  5. Why can't I read news (i.e. Usenet newsgroups) in Yahoo?.
    When you follow news links, such as news - clari.news.top, in Yahoo, you will need access to a local news server (i.e. NNTP server). If you are getting error messages like "cannot talk" or "cannot locate host" you most likely do not have your news server set properly in your WWW browser configuration. Please see your browser documentation on how to set this option. If you do not know what news server you should be connecting to, you'll need to ask your internet provider (e.g. your sys admin) for the machine name. However, some providers will not give you access to a local news server. In this case you have at least two options. First you can look at a list of publicly accessible news servers and try to find one near you that will grant you access. In general these servers are rare due to loading problems. A second option is available through some gopher sites that allow you to read news through their gopher servers. However, using this option will not allow you to click on the news links in Yahoo. Instead you'll have to find the newsgroups yourself in the news hiearchies on the gopher servers.

    Once you have a server for reading news, you still might encounter problems with some of the news links in Yahoo. The most common problem will be "no such group" messages. This will happen when your local news server does not carry that particular news groups. To solve this you'll have to find some other server that does carry that group (see above). This problem is very common with the ClariNews newsgroups since most sites do not carry their news feed.

  6. I like the GIFs used in Yahoo. Can i get the gifs? How do i get gifs?

    Feel free to get and use most GIFs used in Yahoo. We ask you not to use the menubar on its own, since it is becoming synonymous with Yahoo. However, feel free to break it up and use the menu items individually.

    The easiest way to get a in-lined GIF is to take a look at the source ("view source" option on most browsers), find the location in the HTML document that refers to the image. Select "Download to local disk" option on your browser. Then, "open url" on the reference to the image. For example, our "new.gif" figure can be obtained by first setting "download to local disk", and then click on the following: icons/new.gif

  7. What do you use to make the menubar?

    The menubar is made using standard graphics tool on UNIX workstation (xpaint, etc).

  8. How do you make the Yahoo imagemap context sensitive?

    The imagemap functions are done with standard NCSA imagemap utilities. To make the menubar context sensitive (i.e. sensitive to where in the hierarchy it is in), I modified the imagemap.c code to accept arguments and provide redirections based on that argument.

    Unfortunately, we do not release the code publicly because it is specific to Yahoo and be of little use to others (not to mention possible bugs), but it is a straightforward extension.

  9. How do you make the Yahoo email and add form interfaces?
    We don't do anything fancy on forms - in fact we learned everything from the tutorials. We recommend that you read the form tutorials offered by a number of places, especially the one at NCSA.

    For email, look at these links. They teach you how to do it.

  10. How are links gathered for the Yahoo database?
    There are two ways in which Yahoo get its links. First, it's through user submissions. This is done by clicking on the "Add" function in the menubar. Currently submissions comprise almost half of our entries, and growing.

    The second way Yahoo get its links is through automated search robots that look for new announcements at various places, such as NCSA/GNN's What's New, and various newsgroups. The robot checks and retrieve pages that are not on Yahoo for addition.

  11. What is the system set up for Yahoo?
    We get this question frequently. The setup on Yahoo is almost always changing. <--! Removed by Correct v2.0 by Kutsal Berberoglu --> publicly distributed) on the Unix platform. Most functions, including the httpd server, are developed specifically for Yahoo. For hardware, Yahoo is being served on a DEC Alpha 3000/400 workstation. The network connection is a 10Mb/s line.
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