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Yahoo's Build your Own Search Service, otherwise known as "BOSS," is described by Yahoo as "a truly open API with as few rules and limitations as possible. It is designed to allow developers to build search solutions that "can compete head-to-head with the principals in the search industry."
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.
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Boss
Thanks for the article. I hadn't heard that yahoo opened up its search database with a true API. The prior effort was more limited. What I'm wondering, and I what I have been unable to find out perusing the Yahoo BOSS site quickly, is whether one must serves ads on the search results page from Yahoo or can the BOSS user put in ads from Google? One of the examples given by Yahoo on its main BOSS page is of the website www.hakia.com. When you use the hakia customized search engine, the search return page is clustered with ads. Google adsense ads always contain the name Google. Can't find the named Google on Hakia ads so I assume they are from Yahoo.
Seems like a fair tradeoff if that is the deal--we give you free access to our data to allow you to build a customized search engine and, in return, you serve our ads ... but the return would be higher from Google.