Yahoo's Build Your Own Search Service

ruphus13 and other readers alerted us to Yahoo's BOSS, Build your Own Search Service. It gives access to Yahoo's entire databases for Web, image, and news search with no cap on queries per day and no restrictions on mixing Yahoo's search results with others or re-sorting them, and without Yahoo branding visible. From their blog announcement: "As anyone who follows the search industry knows, the barriers to successfully building a high quality, web-scale search engine are incredibly high. Doing so requires hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in engineering, sciences and core infrastructure — from crawling and indexing technology to relevancy and machine learning algorithms, to stuff as mundane as data centers, servers and power. Because competing successfully in web search requires an investment of this scale, new players have effectively been prohibited from delivering credible alternatives to Yahoo! and Google. We believe the BOSS platform will begin to change that."

Comments

Goog

[Faux_Pseudo]

Google already has this feature. I wonder what the differances are. For example how come google didn't get a slashdot story when it launched its version?

Re:Goog

[Quixote]

This is more than Google's CSE.

From Google's CSE docs:

• Apply your website's look and feel to the search results page.
• Provide search refinements within results pages to make it easier for searchers to find the information they're looking for.
• Add sites to your search engine's index as you surf the web.
• Invite friends and trusted users to co-edit and contribute to your search engine.
• Make money from your Custom Search Engine by participating in Google's AdSense program.

Yahoo's BOSS allows you to retrieve raw results from their index, and then munge them as you see fit. Google does not allow you to tinker much with the results (just add/exclude sites), except maybe the presentation.

It's a relaunch of an old API with a new TOS

[Animats]

BOSS is not really new. Yahoo already had the Yahoo Search API, which does essentially the same thing. BOSS is essentially the Yahoo Search API with different terms of service. In particular, BOSS will, in future, allow "monetization". BOSS also allows users to intersperse their own search results with Yahoo's and run ads.

Google used to have a SOAP-based API, but they stopped allowing new users in 2006. It didn't force the caller to display ads. There's still a Google search API, but it's tied to their widgets and has restrictive terms of service.

We support both with SiteTruth. Yahoo search API version Google AJAX search version. The interface code is quite different but the end results are similar.

It's not about technology. It's about what you're allowed to do with the data:

• The Yahoo search API terms of service have a rate limit, don't allow you to add ads, but do allow reordering of results.
• The Google AJAX API terms of service don't have a rate limit, restrict presentation to Google's format, and don't allow reordering of results.
• The first rule of the BOSS Terms of Use is that you don't talk about the BOSS terms of use. "You shall not issue a press release or other written public statement regarding this TOU without Yahoo!'s written approval."

Re:A little hard to believe

[magarity]

That's because you go to Yahoo's portal page. Yahoo's search page is every bit as clean as Google's, and always has been. Meanwhile, Google's portal page is every bit as busy as Yahoo's.