Yahoo! is taking a bold step tonight: opening up its index and search engine to any outside developers who want to incorporate Yahoo! Search's content and functionality into search engines on their own sites. The company that sees just over 20% of the searches performed each day believes that the new program, called BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service), could create a cadre of small search engines that in aggregate will outstrip their own market share and leave Google with less than 50% of the search market.
It's an ambitious and exciting idea. It could also become very profitable when Yahoo! later enables the inclusion of Yahoo! search ads on sites using the BOSS APIs. BOSS will include access to Yahoo! web, news and image searches.
Websites wishing to leverage the BOSS APIs will be allowed to can blend in their own ranking input and change the presentation of results. There are no requirements for attribution to Yahoo! and there's no limit on the number of queries that can be performed.
At launch Yahoo! BOSS will see live integrations with at least three other companies. Hakia will integrate their semantic parsing with the Yahoo! index and search, social browser plug-in Me.dium will use the data it's collected to offer a social search tied to the Yahoo! index, and real-time sentiment search engine Summize was included in the BOSS demo - augmenting Yahoo News search results with related Twitter messages.
More extensive customization and integration with large media companies will be performed with assistance from Yahoo! and ad-free access to the APIs will be made available to the Computer Science departments of academic institutions.
We asked Yahoo! just that, although we believe that alternative search engines can be pretty exciting. None the less, we think it's a valid question.
Senior Director of the Open Search Platform, Bill Michels told us that niche search engines often aren't very good because they have access to a very limited index of content. It's expensive to index the whole web. Likewise, Michels said that there are a substantial number of large organizations that have a huge amount of content but don't have world-class search technology.
In both cases, Yahoo! BOSS is intended to level the playing field and blow the Big 3 wide open. We agree that it's very exciting to imagine thousands of new Yahoo! powered niche search engines proliferating. Could Yahoo! plus the respective strengths and communities of all these new players challenge Google? We think they could.
The BOSS APIs are in beta for now, so they may be expanded with time - but for now there are still a few crown jewels in the company's plans that won't be opened up. We asked about Yahoo's indexing of the semantic web and were told that would not be a part of BOSS. We asked about the Inbox 2.0 strategy and the company's plans to rewire for social graph and data portability paradigms. We were told that those were "other programs."
We hope that there's not a fundamental disconnect there that will lead to lost opportunities and a lack of focus. It is clear, though, that BOSS falls well within the company's overall technical strategy of openness. When it comes to web standards, openness and support for the ecosystem of innovation - there may be no other major vendor online as strong as Yahoo! is today. These are times of openness, where some believe that no single vendor's technology and genius alone can match the creativity of an empowered open market of developers. Yahoo! is positioning itself as leader of this movement.
Let's see what they can do with an army of Yahoo! powered search engines. Let the games begin!
Comments
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Will we see Marshall's Magic Search as a site for the rest of us now? ;)
Posted by: Justin Kistner | July 9, 2008 9:17 PM
a post about boss from someone who worked on it:
http://zooie.wordpress.com/2008/07/10/yahoo-boss-an-insider-view/
Posted by: jim | July 9, 2008 10:22 PM
Go Jerry! No matter what the greedy, small minded try and take away from you - you have yet again proved that you are the BOSS!!!
Posted by: Adam Lindemann
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July 9, 2008 11:03 PM
and did yahoo's stock price soar as a result of this announcement? or even budge? news that suggests increased profitability often nudges trading prices higher. that could bug some people regarding yahoo
Posted by: gregory lent
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July 9, 2008 11:11 PM
this is awesome news. Eagerly waiting for the monetization part to kick in. Nice to see semantic search has embraced the idea!
Go on users...Yahoo! all the way...
Posted by: Vinod | July 9, 2008 11:47 PM
what is really new here with a search api? It's there for years but they kept loosing market share. What's new now that will help change that?
Posted by: Yakov | July 9, 2008 11:48 PM
@Yakov
Their new BOSS API over their previous API:
No daily query limits
No Restrictions on Presentation
Re-Ordering Allowed
Blending of Proprietary and Yahoo Search Content Allowed
Monetization - Coming Soon
White-Label - No Attribution Required
:)
Posted by: D | July 10, 2008 12:32 AM
looks like a local search service in a web archive :)
a problem is what if one builds a popular service and they close access to their API?
Posted by: Yakov | July 10, 2008 2:13 AM
Yahoo BOSS team has a great vision with opening access to their search infrastructure and the model is such that there is no reason for them to ever close access to the API.
This changes the landscape for alt search engines such as ours (cluuz.com).
Great job Yahoo!BOSS and Thank You.
Posted by: Alex | July 10, 2008 4:40 AM
only one could have done it and it has been done ... God bless Yahoo!
Posted by: neil | July 10, 2008 4:46 AM
Yahoo's best option should be to abandon search and focus on something else within the niche instead of clashing with what Google is dominating.
Posted by: Todd Andrews | July 10, 2008 7:38 AM
Marshall,
Great discussion of BOSS. I believe that BOSS is really an excellent strategy for Yahoo to coming back. I am looking forward to the more and more interesting competition of Web search market.
By the way, I have written another analysis of BOSS, which might be a complement to your introduction. My topic is: enough ants may bite an elephant to death (Chinese: 蚁多咬死象)
Yihong
Posted by: Yihong Ding | July 10, 2008 11:50 AM
yahoo search is weak, why build on that platform when its results and index are not strong?
you cannot build a better mousetrap with stale cheese
Posted by: marc anderson | July 10, 2008 4:32 PM
Yahoo BOLDLY entering the Search War with BOSS, ready to attack Google with engines outstretched?
More than a tad sensationalist, I'd say.
XML output of search results is nothing new, it's been around for years now; and frankly, has already been done better.
An established standard for XML output already exists. If you're even slightly interested in BOSS, I highly recommend checking out OpenSearch, you can read about it out at http://www.opensearch.org/Home. It's a simple spec that allows the sharing of search results.
Using OpenSearch, search aggregation has already been done on sites including A9 (http://A9.com), OpenSearchList (http://www.opensearchlist.com/index.aspx) and is used by products like Zoom MasterNode (http://www.wrensoft.com/masternode/index.html) to aggregate search results of search engines, web accessible document databases and web feeders.
Posted by: Veracity | July 10, 2008 5:48 PM
i keep saying yahoo is going to be fine, a lean mean innovation machine, you watch, kara swisher, tc, et al are high school punks
Posted by: gregory lent
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July 17, 2008 11:20 AM