Is Delicious being shut down? And should I be worried about my data?

– No, we are not shutting down Delicious. While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive.

Obviously this is good news. Perhaps we will see something along the lines of Skype’s buyback happen, where the service’s original founders bought the company back from eBay for less than they sold it for. So long as Kevin Rose doesn’t buy it, Delicious should probably be all right. (But I would still recommend backing up your bookmarks, just to be safe.)

Yahoo acquired Del.icio.us back in 2005, and has done little with it. They haven’t run ads on the site or really made any apparent effort to monetize the service. And instead of, I don’t know, selling the service to someone who could make it profitable, they decide to just shut it all down. (Let’s not forget that a meticulously-tagged index of links and their popularity is a wonderful mine of data that advertisers and publishers would love to be able to get metrics from.)

Suffice to say, I am majorly unhappy about this. I have been a Del.icio.us user for years, and have over 2,500 tagged bookmarks stored in the service. Yahoo is suddenly yanking the rug out from under users who have been depending on the service for years. We would gladly put up with ads, or maybe even premium plans. But no, Yahoo is just saying “screw you” to everyone.

Yahoo is dead to me. One by one they are closing the few services that are worth anything. (I assume Flickr and the wonderful BOSS Search API can’t be too far behind?) The services that they are keeping around are things like their vapid content offerings and underwhelming webmail application. They are still stuck in the ’90s, and they are blatantly disregarding the assets that are their most valuable.

Anyway, be sure to export your Delicious bookmarks as soon as possible so you don’t lose them when the site closes. Find an alternative service or simply import them into your web browser’s bookmarking tool.

Update: Yahoo has announced that they will not be shutting Delicious down after all.

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 Readies The Meter For Its First Web Services Business
• Yahoo! BOSS: Now Actually Good for Google

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?

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).

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.

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.)

In order to use Yahoo BOSS, you need to get an API key. If you have a Yahoo account, it will only take about five minutes. Once you’ve got a key, you may want to take a quick look at the API documentation. There aren’t any functioning examples or tutorials, but the guide tells you what sort of queries you can send, and what you can expect to get back in response.

Now for the fun part. Here’s a basic example I threw together. You can use it as a starting point for your own project. It’s fairly basic, as it’s main goal is to illustrate how to go about requesting data from the api and displaying it. You should be able to run the code as-is, though you’ll need to insert your API key before running the script:

<?php if ($_GET['s'] == '') { ?>
<form method="get" style="margin-bottom:30px; margin-top:20px;">
<input type="text" name="s" size="30" /> <input type="submit" value="Search" />
</form>
<?php } ?>

<?php
if ($_GET['s'] != '') {

//Gather data and prepare query
$thequery = urlencode($_GET['s']);
$yhost = 'http://boss.yahooapis.com';
$apikey = 'PASTE_YOUR_API_KEY_HERE';
$url = $yhost.'/ysearch/web/v1/'.$thequery.'?appid='.$apikey.'&format=xml';

//Get the results
$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
$results = new SimpleXmlElement($data, LIBXML_NOCDATA);

//echo the results
foreach ($results->resultset_web->result as $theresult) {
echo '<a href="'.$theresult->clickurl.'">'.$theresult->title.'</a><br/>';
echo $theresult->abstract.'<br/>';
echo '<small><i>'.$theresult->dispurl.'</i></small><br/>';
echo '<br/><br/>';
}

}
?>

As you can see, this is about as basic as an example as you can get. It shows the first ten web results for whatever you enter in the box. If you were to append “&start=20″ to the end of the query URL in the $url variable, it would show results 11-20 instead. That’s the beginning of creating a pagination system to allow a user to move beyond page one of the results.

If you have a little bit of PHP experience (like I recommended earlier; weren’t you listening?), the code should be fairly self-explanetory.

1. First, the script outputs a search box, unless the form has already been submitted. If that’s the case, the script will move on two step 2.
2. If someone has submitted the form, the value of the “s” variable from the browser URL’s query string (it looks like “?s=blah”) is reformatted so spaces and other special characters won’t make the BOSS API puke when it sees them.
3. The API query is assembled. If you were to place the word “echo” before the “$url=…” statement you’d get to see the complete URL when the result page loads. It looks something like “http://boss.yahooapis.com/ysearch/web/v1/iphone?appid=YOUR_API_KEY&format=xml”, where iPhone is the search query and YOUR_API_KEY is, well, your API key. If you’re a JSON maniac you can replace format=xml with format=json, but if you want to do that, you probably don’t need my tutorial.
4. Next, we use the useful cURL extension to send a request to Yahoo saying “give us the data, Yahoo.” After it gets a response, the SimpleXmlElement line parses the returned XML file into a PHP Object.
5. Now we move onto the part where we display the results with a simple foreach() loop. You can style it however you want, maybe write some more semantically correct XHTML, but good old <br /> works well enough to illustrate my point. (Yeah, I’m lazy. )

Now make it your own. You’ve got a basic starting point, and hopefully some knowledge on how it works. Do something unique with it, mash the data up with data from another API.

EDIT: Some of you have been having trouble with the code above. WordPress seems to be trying to “fix” parts of it. Instead of copy/pasting the code above, you should download this .txt file.

I don’t get it.

Sure, the site is new and shiny. But they have nothing on Digg so far.

• Users of Yahoo Buzz can only vote on stories, they cannot submit them.
• Only select sites can have their articles featured (read: really big blogs). Yahoo says they are in beta, and are currently not accepting publisher applications.
• I doubt Yahoo will ever let smaller sites be featured. They’ll most likely keep it weighted towards the bigger sites, with some lame excuse like “all the traffic would kill your site!”

I admit that the potential traffic from Yahoo Buzz is great. As Daily Blog Tips pointed out:

TechCrunch recently published a post revealing the initial traffic details of Yahoo! Buzz. Salon.com reported over one million visitors to a story that was featured on the front page of Buzz. Confirming that number The Huffington Post claimed that they received around 800,000 visitors from the site as well.

My shared hosting definitely wouldn’t stand-up to traffic like that (heck, even Ars Technica has been running slower lately, no doubt from being in the Yahoo Buzz program). But I think most bloggers would agree that they would want the traffic anyway. Hosting issues can be taken care of, and isn’t it a well-known fact that the average Yahoo user is more likely to click ads than most web users?

Besides, by cutting-out smaller blogs, and by using a closed system requiring publishers to be approved before their stories can be submitted (which I have no doubt they will continue using), Yahoo Buzz will never be a true competitor to Digg. The best part of Digg is that any old blog can make it to the front page. If someone has good content that the users will respond to, the article can make it to the front page, uninhibited by restrictions set by the site.

Here’s my idea of how it should work…

If Yahoo is so worried about bringing down people’s shared hosting accounts, they should keep their opt-in publishing scheme, but not have an approval process. In order to have the possibility of having your stories featured, you should have to apply. That way you can’t complain if your server goes down, and anyone would be able to have their article submitted.