Tag Archives: BOSS

Yahoo Monetizes Yahoo BOSS

Feb 13, 2009 by Matt | Posted in Services and Tools 2 Comments

Yahoo is currently readying the next major update to it’s BOSS Search API. With it they will bring access to SearchMonkey data, optional longer abstracts, and greater flexibility for monetization. They will also be tracking API usage, and charging nominally for monthly usage greater than 10,000 queries.

Since launch, the BOSS API has been provided entirely for free. Now Yahoo is putting in place a freemium model where it’ll be free only for developers who generate fewer than 10,000 queries per day. After that, a tiered pricing model will kick in that charges for BOSS as if it were a utility (think AWS). Rates will vary depending on the type of query (web result vs. spelling correction, for example), how many results the developer wants returned per query (with a new maximum of 1000 results), and just how far the developer goes over the free queries cap. (Source: TechCrunch)

It seems reasonable, and Yahoo certainly is improving upon the service. Ten thousand queries for month is a pretty fair ceiling in my opinion. It’s plenty for experimentation or development, or even a web app of reasonably small size.

If Yahoo can leverage BOSS to save themselves from possible bankruptcy, and still have a unique and powerful service, that’s definitely fine by me.

Now pay attention Google: You dumped your API back in 2006, and it’s going to come back to haunt you unless you follow Yahoo’s lead. After a long draught, Yahoo’s getting their game back on, and they’re out to with the developers over with all of their tools.

Yahoo BOSS Search “Vertical Lense”

Nov 30, 2008 by Matt | Posted in Services and Tools No Comments

Remember Yahoo’s BOSS Search API? Well, they’re not done with it yet. A new expansion to the service has just launched, though it is currently available only to “certain Yahoo! partners,” with a promise that it will eventually become part of the main BOSS API.

The new service is called “Vertical Lense Technology.” It allows for topical search engines to be created. These search engines, as seen on TechCrunch, the only site to use the service so far, can

  • Index the partner site in real-time. Whenever a post or comment is added, it’s sent to Yahoo to be instantly indexed.
  • Allow ranking tweaks. When you search on TechCrunch, you are shown a carefully adjusted mix of web and Crunch Network results, ordered in a way that hopefully fits their audience.

TechCrunch describes their experiences with Vertical Lense on their website.

Since we publish using WordPress, supplying our data using the first API essentially required that we design and deploy a plugin that would send information to Yahoo’s servers every time there was a new post or comment on any of our blogs. We also needed to create a similar data indexing system for CrunchBase so that contributions there would show up in the results as well. To ensure that all of our archived content was incorporated in the search index, we supplied Yahoo with historical data dumps from all 10 sites. Perhaps needless to say, this took a considerable amount of time just to ensure that the data we indexed at Yahoo was accurate and complete.

You can read more about this on the Yahoo Search Blog.

Now, when can I get one of these? :D

Sikbox – Live Search Made Easy

Oct 10, 2008 by Matt | Posted in Services and Tools 2 Comments

“Live Search” is a term that people started using somewhere along the line to refer to AJAX-y search forms that display results as you type, rather than taking you to a results page. Kind of like Apple’s Spotlight search in OSX, which I have to say works great.

Wouldn’t it be cool to have something like that on your blog? A search form that, as you type, displays the results in a dropdown instead of a results page? That’s where Sikbox comes in.

Sikbox is a Yahoo BOSS app that allows you to create a cut and paste live search solution. It’s free, easy to install, and you can even apply your own CSS styles to it (or pick from one of the pre-made themes). You can search the entire web with it, or limit it to your website, like most of us would probably do.

Here’s a screenshot of it in action:

If you click on one results, you jump right to it. It works pretty good. It seems to work a lot better than the default WordPress search system too (providing your blog is in the Yahoo index).

The BOSS Mashable Challenge

Sep 21, 2008 by Matt | Posted in Coding No Comments

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.