The Matlab script that uses Yahoo's YQL (Yahoo Query Language) to get stock descriptive data no longer works as of February 2017. I.e., the script at:
https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/34075-get-stock-information-from-yahoo
From what I can tell, the issue has to do with Yahoo pulling support for it. Some information relating to how it used to work is found here:
http://www.yqlblog.net/blog/2009/06/02/getting-stock-information-with-yql-and-open-data-tables/
Using what you learn from yqlblog.net, you can go to https://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/ and note that the table yahoo.finance.quotes are no longer present. In the old days, running a query such as the following would return data:
select * from yahoo.finance.quotes where symbol in ("MSFT")
Meanwhile, other tables, such as the weather data, still works:
select * from weather.forecast where woeid=2502265
While there are other existing scripts that pulls historical pricing data from Google, I am not aware of scripts that does this for stock descriptive data.