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

Totally Boss!

[introspekt.i]

So the ultimate plan is to get students and academicians to make their search services for them. Once they're good enough for market, they can purchase the rights to said BOSS search services (or incomplete ones that look very promising...to part out and use in the code base). That's a good idea coming out of Yahoo! Finally some decent press for them.

Re:Totally Boss!

[menace3society]

It can do a lot of things, actually. One use, as you've noted, is to serve as what amounts to a source of free R&D.

But there are a lot of other things that can come out of this, too:

• People who want more advanced search features (like regex support) can write it themselves instead of pestering Yahoo.
• Better support for foreign language search.
• Since a lot of websites still roll their own site search functionality and do it badly, use Yahoo as a replacement.
• More flexible 'Safe Search' access control.
• etc...

I think it's a great idea. It might open them up to some serious copyright challenges, but if it doesn't (or, preferably, if those challenges get tossed aside), it would be great to see all the search portals do something like this.

A little hard to believe

[decavolt]

"...from delivering credible alternatives to Yahoo! and Google."

I find it a little hard to believe that Yahoo, especially in their current state, actually wants to encourage even more competition against themselves. I think the real target here is more competition for Google, not for Yahoo, and Yahoo seems OK with giving away their own tech if it helps knock Google down a few notches.

Re:A little hard to believe

[Darkness404]

Yet I think what is so funny is Yahoo is what made Google popular in the first place. When I go to Google, I have the A) Google logo B) A search box and C) A bit of navigation. When I go to Yahoo, I have ads, a large Yahoo logo, a page full of useless information, and Flash. Google uses no Flash which is helpful for a Linux user like me, which, although Flash works, it has a terrible CPU leak in the more recent versions.

Really Great Strategy

[saterdaies]

This is one of the smartest moves I've seen Yahoo make. The key is that you are required to run Yahoo ads alongside the search results (when said ads become available).

So, if I'm creating a search for my website, I can go the Google route, embed an iframe and look amateur or go with Yahoo and look professional and completely integrated.

Not only that, but there are a lot of niche markets that big players can't go after that add up to a lot. As someone who programs for those type of sites, Yahoo's BOSS is really appealing. Yahoo ups their ad revenue, I get access to world-class internet search.

It's all about increasing the number of ads served. The more people who choose BOSS, the more ads Yahoo serves and the more money Yahoo makes.