In positive Yahoo! news the hottest search commodity has announced it’s BOSS(Build Your Own Search) platform that will help ‘developers, start-ups, and large Internet companies… …build and launch web-scale search products that utilize the entire Yahoo! Search index’

Yahoo!, recognizing the extreme talent base of its web users, is opening the doors in an effort to further improve its search product. BOSS is an open platform that lets partners ‘developers… …take advantage of Yahoo!’s production search infrastructure and technology, combine that with their own unique assets, and create their own search experiences.’

In a blog post Yahoo! gave a quick summary of what is available to BOSS partners

• Ability to re-rank and blend results — BOSS partners can re-rank search results as they see fit and blend Yahoo!’s results with proprietary and other web content in a single search experience
• Total flexibility on presentation — Freedom to present search results using any user interface paradigm, without Yahoo! branding or attribution requirements
• BOSS Mashup Framework — We’re releasing a Python library and UI templates that allow developers to easily mashup BOSS search results with other public data sources
• Web, news and image search — At launch, developers will have access to web, news and image search and we’ll be adding more verticals soon
• Unlimited queries — There are no rate limits on the number of queries per day

At first glance this seems like a pretty cool thing but the first point above opens a Pandora’s box of possibilities. Allowing sites to ‘re-rank’ search results could potentially cloud search results on some less reputable sites giving top place to advertisers. I know what you are saying ‘We pay to have our ads on sites like Yahoo! and Google’ but you don’t pay to have your site on there organically(non paid).

Search manipulation aside this is a great thing for sites that want to offer a search function. There are no limits on queries per day and no restrictions on presentation. So, search as much as you want and make it look however you want, that’s pretty cool

More on what’s available to date:

Yahoo! has provided some examples of BOSS Partners

• Me.dium, a start-up that’s built an innovative collaborative browsing product used BOSS to build a web-scale search engine that leverages its real-time surfing data. By combining the depth of the Yahoo! Search index with its insight into where users are browsing, Me.dium can provide its users with a unique buzz-based search experience.
• Hakia, a semantic search start-up, is using BOSS to access the Yahoo! Search index and dramatically increase the speed with which it can semantically analyze the web. With BOSS providing this important infrastructure, Hakia is able to deliver a language search experience that isn’t available from any of the "big three" search providers or other semantic search engines.
• Daylife To-Go is a new self-service, hosted publishing platform from Daylife. Anyone can use this platform to generate customizable pages and widgets. Daylife To-Go uses the BOSS API platform to power its web search module.
• Cluuz, a next-generation search engine prototype, generates easier-to-understand search results through semantic cluster graphs, image extraction and tag clouds. The Cluuz analysis is performed in real-time on results returned from the BOSS API.

Get a BOSS Application ID(at time of posting login does not work )

Jason McElweenie

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com