“Developers looking for a blog search API often find the APIs that do exist are providing a variation of a web index,” says Rahul Hampole with the Yahoo Search BOSS team. “We decided to take a different approach. Yahoo! developed a custom blog index where the relevancy is specifically tuned for blogs. This allows us to provide you a wealth of data such as the provider, the author, date of post and in certain cases, contextually relevant terms associated with the article.”

“By their very nature, web indices used for blog search cannot provide the complex functionality that developers demand,” explains Hampole. “For example, try finding a commercial API that will give you all the blog articles written on ‘Yahoo’ in the last week sorted by date. Yes, I know, I couldn’t find one either. Developers can now make that exact query on BOSS and build a rich powerful application. As always, BOSS developers get maximum flexibility on the display of this data.”

Yahoo has set the pricing at ten cents per 1,000 queries. Users can apply to show advertising when they sign up, and those who have already signed up for BOSS can use Blog Search immediately.

Yahoo says it has hundreds of developer sites using BOSS for millions of queries each day. ” We have seen fascinating applications in social, mobile and on the web that are using the service,” says Hampole. “Our goal is to nurture and grow this ecosystem by continuing to add new services and helping you monetize your offering.”

He says the team’s next goal is to “shake things up in mobile,” adding that they’re not planning on a BOSS OS.

Earlier this year, Yahoo launched BOSS v2, which brought a number of new things to the table (including Yahoo Search advertising).

Yahoo says its been working hard for months to keep BOSS “alive and affordable,” and that it will continue to make it more useful through new features and services.

Rahul Hampole of the Yahoo! Search BOSS product team tells us that BOSS has thousands of publishers serving millions of queries per day, and that compared to the Google Custom Search API, it has more “flexibility, data and monetization” in a single API.

Here’s a comparison of features between version 1 and version 2:

“Users have control over the way they display the search results data and combine it with any other content from around the web,” says Hampole. “In addition, they can apply and use search advertising from Yahoo! to monetize it.”

“To switch from BOSS V1 to BOSS V2, there are minor syntax changes that users will have to follow as listed in the BOSS technical documentation,” notes Hampole. “The BOSS product team worked with a few developers to test the new API and they were able to get their service re-wired in 7-10 days.”

Last month, Yahoo released documentation for BOSS to developers so they could prepare for the new version. More on the pricing and markets here.

The documentation includes info on using OAuth with the new API, Syntax specs on querying the API and the format of the returned results, and for calling ads from the platform, as well as the markets that are supported by the product. 

Markets include 40 countries in various native languages. The full list can be found in this section of the documentation. Here’s what the pricing chart looks like:

"BOSS has always been and will be about developers," wrote the BOSS team’s Rahul Hampole. "Our goal is to provide a product that allows you to build sustainable businesses via interesting cloud based search technology at a fair cost. In addition, we encourage BOSS developers to monetize your products using Yahoo! Search advertising – this will enable a long-term, symbiotic relationship between developers, consumers and Yahoo! Our pricing scheme is designed to reflect our belief in this ecosystem."

When Yahoo switched to Bing as a back-end search results provider, a lot of questions were up in the air with regards to BOSS, as well as Yahoo’s other developer search tool, SearchMonkey. Ultimately, Yahoo decided to ditch SearchMonkey and Keep BOSS.

There is of course a fair amount of conversation about the BOSS documentation in the Yahoo Search BOSS Yahoo Group. 

Yahoo’s mind has now been made up. BOSS will carry on, and SearchMonkey won’t.

"In the not too distant future, BOSS will provide web and image search results from Microsoft along with other search-related services and content from Yahoo!, such as news," says Neal Sample, VP of Social, Open, & Publishing Platforms at Yahoo. "In the next 30 days, we will announce the specific details about how BOSS will evolve. We are exploring a potential fee-based structure as well as ad-revenue models that will enable BOSS developers to monetize their offerings. When we roll out these changes, BOSS will no longer be a free service to developers."

SearchMonkey will shut down on October 1. That oges for the tool, the gallery, and the app preferences. "Yahoo! Search is continuing to shift from a model where developers build lightweight apps to install on Yahoo! to one where publishers enhance their own site markup to produce similar results," says Sample. "Yahoo! Search results pages will continue to show enhanced result templates from websites’ page markup and structured data feeds along with Microsoft’s organic listings."

Sample also provides updates on various other Yahoo Developer tools here. He discusses the future of YQL, Site Explorer, Maps, Geo, and Local APIs, and MyBlogLog.

So what does this mean for the search technologies that Yahoo has been working on, and has opened up to third party developers? What does it mean for projects like SearchMonkdey and BOSS? It looks like not even Yahoo knows that yet. The subject was brought up on the Yahoo Developer Blog.

"For SearchMonkey and BOSS, we currently do not have anything concrete to tell you," says Chris Yeh, Head of the Yahoo Developer Network. "Clearly, we’ll need to work with Microsoft to determine what makes the most sense for you and for us."

Ashim Chhabra of the BOSS Team writes the following in a letter to BOSS developers:

What specifically does it mean for BOSS? Honestly the team is still absorbing the implications and we just don’t know. We can tell you that BOSS will remain live for the time being. There are many aspects still to be considered. Over the next several days we’ll be working hard to get clarity and will update the
community as soon as we can.

This is the beginning of a process and we’ll be working with Microsoft to determine what makes the best sense for both us and developers. Regardless, we are certainly committed to continuing to innovate on the user experience of search all across Yahoo! and on continuing to engage with the developer community on several fronts, opening up leading audience experiences and data to third-party innovation. In that context, SearchMonkey can add a lot of value to how we help people get the most out of search and out of Yahoo!. Over the next several months we’ll determine what makes sense with our developer offerings and provide information when available."

Developers should keep in mind that the Microsoft Yahoo deal is centered around search and advertising. Yahoo makes it clear that other developer offerings like YUI, YQL, and Pipes, will not be affected.

The idea of killing the ten blue links should sound familiar; Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have all talked about various types of universal search, and they’ve gone a fair way towards making it a reality, too.  In fact, at least some of the reporters who attended Yahoo’s search event regarded it as little more than a cry for attention.

Yahoo didn’t actually launch a new product or name any release dates, after all, and the event fell between Google’s Searchology conference and the supposed debut of Kumo.

But at least we now have the term WOO.  And Yahoo also took the opportunity to give updates on its SearchMonkey and BOSS technologies.

As a post on the Yahoo Search Blog explained, SearchMonkey is one year old.  It’s live in 23 markets, provides 70 million enhanced results every day, and supposedly, "[s]ite owners have seen a more than 15% increase in the click-through rates of their SearchMonkey search results when tested against non-SearchMonkey results."

In regards to BOSS, the post said, "[W]e’ve made key updates including allowing developers to monetize through third-party platforms and enabling access to SearchMonkey structured data.  The BOSS API is on track to hit 1 billion monthly queries in May, without even including the volume from traditional Yahoo Search syndication.  This is more than three times the queries served just six months ago, and ranks ahead of the combined searches on Ask and Facebook, and just behind Microsoft."

Yahoo’s not necessarily in terrible shape, then.  It just threw a big party for no particular reason.

Ashim Chhabra, a member of the Yahoo Search Boss Team, explained on the Yahoo Search Blog, "The Delicious data available today through BOSS includes Delicious saves, top tags, and count information."  Working in all of this seems like a smart move, since Delicious is one of Yahoo’s more popular properties.

 

As for the other stuff, BOSS has been made to support Chinese, Czech, and Hungarian, and according to Chhabra’s blog post, "BOSS is now equipped with Advanced Language functionality so that you can filter specific language results for a given market."  Which makes the platform more accessible to developers who serve foreign regions.

"Finally," the official post stated, "BOSS News Service can now sort by a date or a specified time range of days, weeks, or hours."

All of this might not quite add up to irresistibility, but developers should be hard-pressed to complain, and Chhabra promised that more BOSS updates are on the way.

Let’s start with the stuff that is best for users.  Ashim Chhabra wrote on the Yahoo Search Blog, "Perhaps the most important component of what we’re releasing today is access to SearchMonkey structured data through the BOSS API.  The primary way in which SearchMonkey acquires structured data is by using the Yahoo! Web Crawler to scour the web for embedded semantic markup such as microformats or RDF.  Starting today, all this data is available to BOSS API users."

Next, Chhabra seemed pleased to make "Long Abstracts" available.  This will essentially bring 300-character page descriptions into the mix, whereas developers were stuck with 170 characters beforehand.  Finally, Site Explorer info about inlinks for domains and URLs will become available through two new BOSS services.

Not bad, eh?  And really, neither are the new BOSS usage fees.  Even as Yahoo’s only going to charge developers who see more than 10,000 queries a day, the cost per unit after that is just $0.10.  Plus, while all of the nice, new features should be available immediately, the pricing change isn’t supposed to take place until sometime late in the second quarter.

It’s hard to say what effect these developments will have on the adoption of BOSS and Yahoo’s revenue stream, but they look like steps in the right direction.

BOSS has now reached a milestone of serving over 10 million queries per day. "10 million in and of itself isn’t particularly significant, but we’re sharing it because we believe growing to more than 100 queries a second in just over 5 months says something about the demand for an open search platform," says Bill Michels of the BOSS Team. "As a point of reference, the total queries from these developer-built, BOSS-powered search engines would rank ahead of the combined searches done on both Facebook and Amazon, and just behind Ask.com."

Michels is also quick to point out that, "because these queries are delivered via the BOSS API and served up by our partners, they aren’t counted as Yahoo! Search queries by comScore or other metrics providers."

I think time will tell how much demand there really is for open search, and how much (and if) Yahoo’s new strategies really cut into Google’s percentage of the search market share. It is refreshing to see some new and different things happening with Yahoo and search in general, regardless.

For example, TechCrunch has launched a technology-flavored search engine as Yahoo cites as its first example. This search engine allows TechCrunch users to search for technology-focused articles and company info across TechCrunch’s network as well as the web, a Yahoo representative tells WebProNews.

BOSS vertical lens technology provides a handful of features that were implemented on the TechCrunch search engine:

- Real-time indexing of proprietary content – Once TechCrunch content is added or a user comment is submitted, the search index almost immediately reflects the changes.

- Customized ranking – The BOSS and TechCrunch teams worked closely to fine-tune the ranking algorithm to fit the TechCrunch audience and user experience.

- Structured search – BOSS supports faceted refinement around TechCrunch’s structured content.  This offers powerful tools for people who want to fine tune their searches or browse TechCrunch content – e.g. narrowing in on articles on Twitter written only by Michael Arrington, or only the most popular articles (popularity is determined by number of comments), or locating all companies that are founded in 2008. 

- Blending Web with proprietary content in a single search display – After querying both the TechCrunch and the Web indices, BOSS blends the results to produce one result set that is both relevant and comprehensive.

Speaking of BOSS, there’s a new post up on the Yahoo Developer Network blog talking a new tool that lets you match search terms with relevant keywords to increase search engine visibility. This is a new feature of BOSS and the tool, called Keywordfinder, does this as well.

The post also has an explanation of how to do the same thing using only javascript. The author says it’s not quite as simple but its not really magic either.