A couple months ago, Yahoo released a promising new search API called Yahoo Search BOSS. It allows you to query results from Yahoo’s servers and display them how you want, reordering them even. No hard query limis are in place either. It’s pretty awesome.

Well, if you’ve got some l33t coding skills, Yahoo has a challenge for you. Mashable and Yahoo are partnering to bring you the BOSS Mashable Challenge. You have until September 28 to build an amazing search mashup using the BOSS API.

The BOSS Mashable Challenge pits developer against developer to compete for the grand prize of $2,000 and an article on Mashable about your winning entry. How do you win?  Build a kickass mashup – search engine or any other Web app – using the BOSS API and any other data sources/technologies.

The public will vote on the submissions to see who gets the grand prize and who the runner up is.

Sounds like a lot of fun, and I bet we’ll see some cool web apps come out of this.

Yahoo recently released a new search API. Known as Yahoo BOSS, for “Build your Own Searcg Service,” the API allows you to query search results from their servers, format them however you want, mash the data up with other services, and even re-order results. You get “Unlimited*” queries (they just reserve “the right to limit unintended usage, such as automated querying by bots”) and they don’t even require attribution.

Even though I’m what you could possibly call a “Google/Apple fanboy” (though you would be advised to not say such things…), and I’ve long dismissed Yahoo as boring, geared towards web newbies, among other things, I have to admit, this is a great API. Google never gave us anything like this (despite their seemingly unlimited resources) and they discontinued their fairly limited search API. (As a side note, I also admit that Yahoo owns some great web services, such as Flickr and Del.icio.us.)

I’ve already got to work playing with the API, creating a sort of search mashup. I figured I’d share a little bit of code, and show you how to create a basic SERP. Be warned, the following requires PHP5 and some cURL black magic. (If you have no idea what I just said, read a book, and come back later.) (more…)