How reliable is yahoo finance?

How reliable is yahoo finance ?

For example the below request : http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/?q=show%20tables&env=store://datatables.org/alltableswithkeys#h=select%20*%20from%20yahoo.finance.quotes%20where%20symbol%20in%20%28%22YHOO%22%2C%22AAPL%22%2C%22GOOG%22%2C%22MSFT%22%29

intermittently returns the response : "The current table 'yahoo.finance.quotes' has been blocked. It exceeded the allotted quotas of either time or instructions"

Here is the complete response :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<query xmlns:yahoo="http://www.yahooapis.com/v1/base.rng"
    yahoo:count="0" yahoo:created="2013-04-08T11:16:18Z" yahoo:lang="en-US">
    <diagnostics>
        <publiclyCallable>true</publiclyCallable>
        <url execution-start-time="24" execution-stop-time="25"
            execution-time="1" proxy="DEFAULT"><![CDATA[http://www.datatables.org/yahoo/finance/yahoo.finance.quotes.xml]]></url>
        <cache execution-start-time="27" execution-stop-time="27"
            execution-time="0" method="GET" type="MEMCACHED"><![CDATA[13c4f8eac77ad886bade5a711c8c1ef5]]></cache>
        <javascript name="yahoo.finance.quotes" verb="select"><![CDATA[The current table 'yahoo.finance.quotes' has been blocked. It exceeded the allotted quotas of either time or instructions]]></javascript>
        <user-time>28</user-time>
        <service-time>1</service-time>
        <build-version>35405</build-version>
    </diagnostics> 
    <results/>
</query>

To get a reliable service do I need to sign up and pay ?

Solution

To get a reliable service do I need to sign up and pay ?

Here are the limits:

                    Public  OAuth with API Key
Hourly Cap          2,000   20,000
Daily Cap           None    100,000

To better understand the rate limits in the above table, let's use the following example. Suppose you create an application that generates around 3,000 requests from each user per hour. You notice though that users are capped at a maximum of 2,000 calls using the public endpoint, so you register an API Key with Yahoo! to use the authenticated/authorized endpoint. Now your users can make 20,000 requests per hour and up to a total of 100,000 requests per day.

oAuth is free.

References