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. 

"The new page is designed to help you easily find and explore the things that matter most to you. The Yahoo! Search team is delighted to demonstrate our commitment to innovate in search technology and deliver an amazing user experience," says Larry Cornett, Vice President, Consumer Products, Yahoo Search.

Yahoo names the following as key highlights of the new Yahoo Search:

Intelligent Search Results – Allows you to explore results from key sites and narrow results using different types of SearchMonkey structured data. Over the past few months, even more enhanced results for product, local, entertainment, reference, social, and tech sites have been displayed automatically. With the new search page design, we have made it easier to see these riche results from an increasing number of sites.

Search Assist Expansion – With the new design, our powerful query assistance is still available directly below the search box, but we’ve also incorporated it into the left-hand column for quick access lower on the page, even when the Search Assist layer is hidden. You can use this column to easily explore and discover concepts related to your query. We have added Search Assist to the search box on every Yahoo! page in the U.S. with the launch of a new universal header.

Along with the change to Yahoo Search itself, comes a "revamping" of Yahoo’s image search and video search results pages. In the left-hand columns on these, you wil get links to related categories.

"Rather than building this new experience on top of our existing front-end technology, our talented engineering and design teams rebuilt much of the foundational markup/CSS/JavaScript for the SRP design and core functionality completely from scratch," says Cornett. "This allowed us to get rid of old cruft and take advantage of quite a few new techniques and best practices, reducing core page weight and render complexity in the process."

Yahoo says the new Yahoo Search includes improved page load time, improved perceived load time, and inline data URI images. It’s now available in the US, the UK, France, Spain, Mexico, and India.

The new search has a three-column layout (Search Engine Land has a bunch of screenshots), with most of the changes occurring in the left-hand column. This is where filters and search applications reside.

Image from Search Engine Land

One interesting aspect of the new Yahoo Search is that they are going after Google (apparently calling them out by name) with regards to searching for people. When you search for a person you will get their Facebook, Twtitter, LinkedIn, and FriendFeed profiles when applicable.

"When we launch this, you’re going to come to Yahoo to search for people," Larry Cornett, VP Search Products and Design is quoted as saying. There appears to be a heavy focus on personalization with the new Yahoo Search.

As you are probably well aware, Yahoo has a deal in the works with Microsoft that will have Bing delivering the search results for Yahoo searches, should the deal get through regulators. Yahoo says it will still compete on the front-end. They want to give users the best front-end search experience, which they will build themselves, based on Bing’s back-end technology.

When asked how different search results will look on Yahoo from those on Bing, Yahoo said, "We are not a version of Bing. We are the Yahoo search experience." They also said that they will have freedom on the advertising side, but that some would be provided by Microsoft as well. That’s interesting.

Yahoo also announced the new version of Yahoo Messenger today with a focus on social networks and video. Read more about that here.

Here’s some more on the new Yahoo Search from the press release:

Demonstrating its commitment to continued innovation in the search experience, Yahoo! is testing a new search results page, aligned with the design of the new Yahoo! homepage and aimed at making Web search more personally relevant. The test, available randomly to millions worldwide, delivers a differentiated search experience that lets people better explore the things, people and websites that matter to them most. New functionality being tested includes:

• Results Filtering Options – The page provides new tools for refining search results including exploring related concepts, displaying only results from popular Yahoo! and third-party sites, and narrowing results by different types of content such as people, videos and discussion forums.
• Intelligent Search Results – Enhanced assistance creates a more personally relevant experience that better understands what people are looking for based on prior searches. It is powered by search session science that detects intent by looking at search behavior over time. For example, a search for “Paris” followed by searches for “flights” and “cheap hotels” helps Yahoo! Search understand that someone is seeking travel-related content versus gossip about a Hollywood heiress.
• Easy Access to Search Controls – The new site provides quick access to Search Scan/SafeSearch, which helps protect users from viruses, spyware and search spam, and Search Pad, the personal research assistant that lets people capture, organize, save and share information they find while researching online.
• Search Assist Expansion – Yahoo!’s popular real-time query suggestion engine, Search Assist, has been introduced to the search box on every Yahoo! page in the U.S. with the launch of a new universal header. This new header unifies key design and navigation elements, with links to popular Yahoo! destinations such as My Yahoo!, Finance, News, Sports, Mail and the Yahoo! homepage.

Discussion at WebmasterWorld ranged from:

"Looks like I’ve lost more links on this update than last, which is worrying…"

to

"This update, went from #12 to #2."

Dan Rampton on the Yahoo Search Blog writes:

We’ll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days and expect the update will be completed soon. As you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.

To share your thoughts or check in with other Yahoo! Search users, please visit the Site Explorer Suggestion Board.

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land says that the update is probably over due to a lack of new forum discussion around Yahoo Search. He suggests that we will probably not see another update until the end of the month.

"Let’s say for example, you are doing research online to buy a new TV," a representative for Yahoo tells me. "Using Search Pad you no longer need to save the sites you are researching as a bunch of links in a document, or in bookmarks or even scribbled on a sticky note. Yahoo!’s Search Pad will intelligently detect your intent to do research online, and then automatically track the websites you want to save by organizing the addresses and information in notes which you can edit, save, delete, print or share."

"Search Pad helps users complete important tasks that require multiple searches over a period of time," she added. Users can always access Search Pad from Yahoo results pages, and add their own notes to entries whenever they feel like it. They can also organize the notes within Search Pad.

The rep put me in touch with Tom Chi, Senior Director of Product Management with Yahoo Search, who when asked about a possible mobile version tells me, "At this time, Search Pad is only available on Yahoo! web search, not mobile search; however Yahoo! Search is continually innovating new Yahoo! Search features for our users."

Will Yahoo use any of the data collected for any reason other than to deliver this feature?

"This follows the same data retention policy we have across Yahoo!," explains Chi. "We recently announced a new policy.  Under the new policy, Yahoo! will anonymize user log data within 90 days with limited exceptions for fraud, security and legal obligations. Yahoo! will also expand the policy to apply not only to search log data but also page views, page clicks, ad views and ad clicks."

Will users be able to disable the feature?

"Users can turn the program off for the current session using the drop down menu in the Search Pad display in the upper right area of the Search Results page," he says. "The program can also be turned off indefinitely via the Enable/Disable control in the main Search Preferences which can be found in the Options drop down menu at the top of the Search Results page."

Search Pad is still in its testing phase, and will not be available to the public for a few months. Hopefully it will launch with a minimal amount of bugs as a result. The feature is just the latest example of how Yahoo is striving to set itself apart in search, an industry that is so dominated by Google.

Are You Fatigued By Search?

The situation forms part of what motivated Yahoo’s search team to launch Search Assist, a new feature for Yahoo Search, earlier this month.

Larry Cornett and Tom Chi said at the Yahoo Search blog they wanted to improve not just the search, but the query as well, by making it smarter. This would help people who customarily need three or four searches to find what they need.

The release of Search Assist breaks the problem of searching into two parts, they said. Part one is the autocomplete function of Search Assist. It speeds up typing the query and helps the poor spellers out there find what they want.

They also cited part two of the solution, where Search Assist helps people move sideways, backward or forward with a query:

So if you started with a query for ‘Thom Yorke,’ you might get a forward (refining) suggestion for ‘Eraser,’ his most recent album, or a backward (expanding) suggestion for ‘Radiohead,’ the band he’s a member of. You could also get a sideways (or related) suggestion such as ‘solo albums’ which, when clicking on the term in the left-hand column of Search Assist, will lead you to other lead singers with solo albums like Gwen Stefani or Eddie Vedder.

Search Assist is a friendly, powerful tool for searching. As search industry observers, we like seeing technology that makes it easier for people to accomplish their searches, along with spurring competition to raise the bar even further in the field.

Yahoo Unleashes New Search Crawler

It has taken a few weeks for Yahoo to ensure its new version of Slurp will work properly, which explains why sites have probably seen a lot more Yahoo requests trawling their sites.

On the Yahoo! Search blog entry about the new Slurp crawler, David Simpson and Priyank Garg discussed the switch in their Weather Report post:

As always, ranking changes and page shuffling around the index may have happened for websites, so publishers will want to take a look at where they show up now in Yahoo! Search.

The efficiency as reported by Yahoo should be welcome by publishers when their new bandwidth bills arrive.

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The three Ps of LAMP – Perl, PHP, and Python, have support in the Yahoo Search SDK, along with C/C++ and Java languages, and others. Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodny announced the updated SDK on Yahoo’s Search blog.

He noted how the Yahoo Developer Network has come a long way in the year and a half since its inception. After starting life as a BSD-licensed kit with a few search-related web services, their Developer Network has grown substantially.

Search service developers can join up with Yahoo’s Developer Network by reviewing the project’s documentation, requesting an Application ID, and obtaining the SDK.

Yahoo allows developers to use data from the following sources:

•  Audio Search

•  Content Analysis

•  Image Search

•  Local Search

•  MyWeb

•  News Search

•  Site Explorer

•  Video Search

•  Web Search

Developers can look through the Gallery for ideas on building search applications for examples like Rollyo, a personal search engine creation website, and other ideas.

Discuss this article with your fellow WebPros at WebProWorld.
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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.