Yahoo is bringing together two of its most interesting projects today, Yahoo BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) and SearchMonkey, its semantic indexing and search result enhancement service. There were a number of different parts of the announcement - but the core of the story is simple.
Developers will now be able to build their own search engines using the Yahoo! index and search processing infrastructure via BOSS and include the semantic markup added to pages in both results parsing and the display of those results. There's considerable potential here for some really dazzling results.
]]> We wrote about the genesis of Search Monkey here this Spring, it's an incredibly ambitious project. The end result of it is rich search results, where additional dynamic data from marked up fields can also be displayed on the search results page itself. So searching for a movie will show not just web pages associated with that movie, but additional details from those pages, like movie ratings, stars, etc. There's all kinds of possibilities for all kinds of data.
Is anyone using Yahoo! BOSS yet? Anyone who will be able to leverage Search Monkey for a better experience right away? Yahoo is encouraging developers to tag their projects bossmashup in Delicious. As you can see for yourself, there are a number of interesting proofs of concept there but not a whole lot of products. Of the products that are there, very few seem terribly compelling to us so far.
We must admit that the most compelling BOSS implementation so far is over at the site of our competitors TechCrunch. Their new blog network search implementation of BOSS is beautiful - you can see easily, for example, that TechCrunch network blogs have used the word ReadWriteWeb 7 times in the last 6 months. (In case you were wondering.)
Speaking of TechCrunch, that site's Mark Hendrickson covered the Yahoo BOSS/Search Monkey announcement today as well, and having worked closely on the implementation there he's got an interesting perspective on it. He points out that the new pricing model, free up to 10,000 queries a day, will likely only impact a handful of big sites - not BOSS add-ons like TechCrunch search or smaller projects.
The other interesting part of the announcement is that BOSS developers will now be allowed to use 3rd party ads on their pages leveraging BOSS - not just Yahoo adds. That's hopeful.
Can Yahoo do it? Can these two projects brought together lead to awesome search mashups all over the web? We've had very high hopes in the past. Now the proof will be in the pudding.
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