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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."
It will be really interesting to learn how all the Inktomi technology works and how it well it was integrated with Yahoo.
Kriston
And I thank Jerry Yang's ego very much for that.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
"Better for the shareholders" is a subjective term. To YOU, you think selling out and making the board a quick wad of cash was "Better for the shareholders". The thing is, Microsoft loves to buy and completely wreck successful companies. I think, from a business point of view, that selling out to Microsoft would mean the death march for Yahoo. You and I don't know what Yahoo has up their sleeve. They have been taking some new and interesting paths lately. It may be that it is "Better for the shareholders" to ride the new wave and see where it takes them.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
the right thing to do for the shareholders
That is an interesting choice of words. You are presenting this opinion as fact where I believe there is room for many other interpretations. There are a lot ways that taking the deal could have been the wrong thing to do.
It was only guaranteed to be the "right thing" if you define the "right thing" as "maximizing short term stock price gains". There are many other ways that the "right thing" could be defined where that deal may or may not have been better. Things like "Maintaining reasonable profit growth for the next 50 years." or even "Providing a work environment that reduces employee attrition". I'm not saying that MS is necessarily bad at these things but a CEO could definitely make a case that the company would be better served by staying independent.
I personally never invest in companies that have a history of making decisions where the "right thing" is defined as "maximizing short term stock price gains". When you do that you're not building anything you're just gambling.
As I read the announcement, running Yahoo ads is not a requirement. Running Yahoo ads will be a future option to those who want to use the ads as a profit stream, but it's up to the site owner to decide.
If you like, you could take your Yahoo search results ad-free and run Google ads next to them. That's why this announcement is so bold - there are basically no requirements or limits on using BOSS.
This in affect gives Yahoo and the local media players and far more effective search platform and a real market threat to google as well as of course that other major players in the search engine business.
This wider distribution of search engine services will also push search from the current marketing perceived foreground way into the back ground as simply a subsidiary service of any typical major web portal whilst simultaneously pushing local web portals into the foreground in local markets by them being able to offer globally effective search services on their site.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen