Monday, 14 July 2008

Yahoo Opens Up Search

Yahoo, Thursday introduced a new open Web services platform, Yahoo! Search BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service), which gives third parties an opportunity to access to Yahoo! Search Technology...

Yahoo, Thursday introduced a new open Web services platform, Yahoo! Search BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service), which gives third parties an opportunity to access to Yahoo! Search Technology, including the ability to re-rank and control the presentation of Web search results.

Available currently as an API in beta, Yahoo! Search BOSS enables developers and companies to build world-class custom search experiences and disrupt the search industry.

"Today, the search market is generally limited to three major search engines to drive innovation and growth," said Prabhakar Raghavan, chief strategist for Yahoo! Search.

"BOSS opens up the playing field for developers and companies to disrupt the search market, become principals in search and build new Web search experiences that offer more choice for users."

BOSS provides developers and companies access to its algorithmic search infrastructure without incurring the significant costs required to build Web-scale search experiences. By using the BOSS platform, partners have the opportunity to provide industry leading search results. BOSS allows for control over the presentation and ranking of Web search results as well as unlimited queries per day. Its framework allows developers to blend Yahoo! Search results from Web, news and image indexes with any data source from across the Web. Over time, other Yahoo! Search indexes will become available.

According to the Internet search behemoth, over the next several months, a BOSS monetization capability, using Yahoo! search advertising and potentially other models, will be made available for partners and developers to create a search revenue stream for their business.