Yahoo's Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS) has recently expanded to include geolocation data from two Yahoo services: Placefinder and Placespotter. BOSS is Yahoo's Search API, available for a fee based on usage. From the blog post, it sounds like Yahoo is closing down Placefinder and Placespotter as standalone, free services, and is incorporating them into the paid structure of BOSS. Placefinder provides geocoding and reverse geocoding, which enables developers to convert an address to its latitude/longitude or vise versa. Placespotter provides related location information Yahoo BOS [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Local | Yahoo: APIs | Yahoo: Maps & Local | Yahoo: Search

Yahoo has just launched version 2 of BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service). When they announced this version in February, I wrote about the history of BOSS and detailed the changes. The big changes are: The web and image search results are now sourced from Microsoft's search index Yahoo branding attribution is now required (the first version allowed white labeling) Developers are charged based on query volume (the first version was free) the key terms/query suggestions feature has been discontinued Upgrade Process Yahoo says that it's taken 7-10 days for developers they've worked [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Yahoo: APIs | Yahoo: Search

Yahoo has just announced that they're about to launch a new version of BOSS with a fee structure based on query volume. (The initial version launched in 2008 was free, and a fee structure for high volume use was first talked about in 2009). Yahoo BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) provides an API that enables developers to use Yahoo search results in their applications. What else is new? The web search results will be coming from Microsoft's Bing index rather than Yahoo's. A earlier post noted, "BOSS will continue to be a RESTful API for web, image, and news search. Core web an [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Yahoo: APIs | Yahoo: Search

News is traveling fast about a leaked slide from a Yahoo "all hands" meeting earlier this week that listed several products -- including Delicous and AltaVista -- to be "sunsetted." Yahoo confirms that Yahoo Buzz will be closed, as will the Traffic APIs. Delicious seems likely to go, too. Here's the statement we received from Yahoo: Part of our organizational streamlining involves cutting our investment in underperforming or off-strategy products to put better focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation in the next year and beyond. We continuously evaluate and prioritize our po [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Top News | Yahoo: APIs | Yahoo: Buzz | Yahoo: Delicious | Yahoo: MyBlogLog

The Yahoo Search Blog announced BOSS is switching, as expected, to a paid model. BOSS which launched in July 2008 has become a favorite of many developers when building their own search engine off of Yahoo's data. With the organic Yahoo results being powered by Bing now, and the Microsoft deal closed, Yahoo has decided to switch BOSS to a pay per use model. Microsoft Bing will be powering some of these results, but not all. They will charge on a cost-per-query model where the price will vary from $0.40 to $0.75 CPM (cost per 1000 BOSS queries). The price, as Yahoo explained, will de [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Yahoo: APIs | Yahoo: Search

A post by Ashim Chhabra from the Yahoo Boss team in the Tech Group adds some details to how Yahoo BOSS will survive under the Yahoo-Microsoft deal. It appears that Yahoo is allowed to continue operating BOSS under the Microsoft deal. Some of the results will be powered by Yahoo, while the search results in BOSS will be powered from Microsoft Bing. But Ashim explained that BOSS needs to make financial sense to Yahoo and somewhat implied that they are exploring a fee based structure to use BOSS in the future. Here is the full post from Ashim: BOSS Developers, Thank you for your [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Yahoo: APIs | Yahoo: Business Issues | Yahoo: Search | Yahoo: Search Builder

By now, everyone has read all about the news that Yahoo is replacing its search index with Microsoft's Bing. In a way, it's a great story of complete reversal, as in 2002, Microsoft didn't have its own index and instead used Inktomi. Late that year, Yahoo! acquired Inktomi, which spurred Microsoft to start building its own search index to avoid having a search supplier owned by a major competitor. Now Yahoo is ditching its index (including all of the technology it acquired with Inktomi) to use the very index it motivated Microsoft to build. We've read about what this means for advertisers ( [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Microsoft & Yahoo Search Deal | Microsoft: Bing | SEO - Search Engine Optimization | Top News | Yahoo: APIs | Yahoo: Search Monkey | Yahoo: Site Explorer

Yesterday Yahoo spoke about taking search much more into the real world by turning "web pages" into "web objects." Today there were a couple of announcements at the Where 2.0 conference related to identifying unstructured data online and linking it according to places and locations -- in other words made geo-relevant. Tyler Bell of Yahoo gave the talk at Where about a "geo-enriched location-aware internet." Where is a very developer-focused event. Bell's talk was essentially about building the location "infrastructure" that will help support the vision articulated at the Yahoo Search event [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Local | Yahoo: APIs | Yahoo: Maps & Local | Yahoo: Search

Yahoo has added a few new tools to its BOSS platform that the company says will give developers more insight to their search results and help build unique search experiences. The new tools include: Integration with Delicious content - end-users can get Delicious saves, top tags, and count information within their search results Advanced language capabilities - developers can now filter specific language results for a given market. BOSS now supports Czech, Hungarian, and traditional Chinese New sorting functionality - BOSS News service can now sort by date and/or a specified time rang [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Yahoo: APIs | Yahoo: Other

Today, Yahoo! has announced several new features to their Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS) platform as well as usage fees. When BOSS launched in July 2008, the stated goal was to spur innovation and disrupt the search market. Will the additional of usage fees hinder that goal and become a barrier to entry for the cost-limited startups Yahoo! was originally trying to help? Yahoo says no, that they "believe that introducing the proposed pricing structure will improve the ecosystem by optimizing capacity for our serious developers." Fee structure The BOSS charges kick in only once queri [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Top News | Yahoo: APIs | Yahoo: Search Monkey

Yesterday, we got a new news search engine which taps into Twitter that Yahoo's excited about, as it uses their BOSS system. That kind of annoyed me. Why didn't Yahoo just build the service themselves? Or a regular Twitter search service, for that matter? And where's Twitter search from Google? BOSS is Yahoo's Build Your Own Search Service product, which lets anyone take Yahoo's data and create their own search engine. It's grown into part of Yahoo's "open strategy" where it hopes to make gains on the web by supposedly pulling in data from everywhere as well as being open to others [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Search Engines: Word Of Mouth & Buzz Search Engines | Top News | Yahoo: APIs

The Yahoo Search Blog announced that BOSS, Yahoo's build your own search service, is now serving 10 million queries per day. That is about 100 queries per second and according to Yahoo, who cites comScore, that is just behind Ask.com's search volume. Note, these queries do not count as part of Yahoo's search network, because they are technically served at third party web sites. We asked Yahoo which services were using BOSS most often, which queries were most popular and so on. Yahoo was unable to give us an answer, due to not having their partner's consent. It would be nice to see how [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Yahoo: APIs | Yahoo: Search

In July Yahoo! launched their BOSS API, which enables you to "build your own search service". Today, they've expanded the functionality of that API by adding a Key Terms feature. The technology used in Key Terms is the same used for Search Assist, which provides search suggestions and enables searchers to explore concepts related to the query. Yahoo! says they're adding this feature in response to developers' requests for greater access to "deep infrastructure assets". The Key Terms feature uses term frequency and positional and contextual heuristics to return ordered lists that describe a [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Top News | Yahoo: APIs

Yahoo! has just unveiled the next phase in their plan to spur search innovation by providing search-related resources to developers. The Yahoo! Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS) enables developers to access Yahoo! search results, combine them with other sources, rerank them, and define their appearance. Yahoo! says they are making BOSS available in an attempt to spur innovation in the search space and disrupt the market. They point out that unlike with other web companies, a search startup has many obstacles: from cost (it takes a lot of machines to process all the web’s data) to expert [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Yahoo: APIs | Yahoo: Search

Yahoo's relatively new CTO Ari Balogh expanded upon Yahoo's "open" initiatives in a keynote speech to the Web2.0 conference yesterday. There's a very extensive discussion, including a video of the keynote, on the TechCrunch site (additional coverage in Search Engine Journal). The SearchMonkey beta is the first step in executing on the strategy, which will roll out in increments over the next several months. The "OS" part is not "operating system" but "open strategy." Beyond openness, the themes of Balogh's talk were making Yahoo more social, more consistent and unified, more personal, and eve [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Yahoo: APIs | Yahoo: General | Yahoo: Other | Yahoo: Search | Yahoo: Search Monkey | Yahoo: User Interface

The Yahoo Search Blog announced a new WordPress plugin that automatically creates Yahoo Shortcuts for the words you write in a blog post. If you mention a stock ticker, that word on your blog will typically contain a mouse-over effect that will display a Yahoo Finance chart. Or if you have an address, they might show you a Yahoo Map. Yahoo integrated the plugin with web search, maps, finance, product search, Flickr, Yahoo Autos, news search, and more. For more details, visit http://shortcuts.yahoo.com/. Oh, and if you are one of the first 500 bloggers to integrate this into your WordPres [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Yahoo: APIs | Yahoo: Shortcuts

Ekstreme noticed that Yahoo Search is supporting auto-discovery for searches. Yahoo has been doing this since at least 2005, but it's still not known to many people. Here's how it works: Conduct a search at Yahoo Search for yahoo and notice that if you are using Firefox or a recent browser, an RSS indicator will show up in the URL bar. Here is a screen capture of that in action on my Firefox Mac browser--notice the little RSS icon in the URL bar. Yahoo also has auto-discovery for Yahoo News, Flickr, Images, and other vertical search results. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Yahoo: APIs | Yahoo: Search

Yahoo announced they will be providing free and fee-based API access to their new Panama search marketing platform. The Yahoo Search Marketing Commercial API Program gives free access to "Yahoo Search Marketing's robust and scalable APIs, and offers growing businesses optional fee-based services to accommodate their wide ranging needs. These services can be customized to include significant technical support, product roadmap visibility and co-marketing services to provide open, reliable partnership support to companies creating and selling commercial advertising applications." Here are the [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Yahoo: APIs | Yahoo: Search Ads