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 feedback. We understand your frustration. This process has been long for all of us due to the complex nature of our agreement with Microsoft, and we appreciate your patience.

Under this agreement, Yahoo! is permitted to continue offering the BOSS web service, with search results that would integrate Yahoo! services and content with algorithmic results provided by Microsoft. As always, our intention is to provide a BOSS offering as long as it makes business and economic sense to do so. We are still examining what the BOSS offering will consist of, with some services powered by Microsoft, unique content that Yahoo! currently provides, and the potential for additional Yahoo! content in the future.

Prior to the announcement of the Yahoo!-Microsoft search agreement, we’d already shared our intention to explore a fee-based structure for BOSS. We continue to explore an appropriate fee structure or other revenue model as we work through the future of BOSS.

As you know, we must receive regulatory clearance before actual implementation of the search deal with Microsoft can occur. Only then can we finalize the future shape of BOSS. Of course, we will provide additional clarity and certainty when we can.

Thanks for your attention!

Ashim Chhabra The Yahoo! Search BOSS Team

Hat tip to TechCrunch for spotting this.

How do you get ads in your BOSS results? You have to apply for approval by one of Yahoo’s 3rd party syndication partners, Domain Development Corp (DDC). You can enroll at signup.ddc.com. This means Yahoo is not directly supporting the service or providing direct reporting, DDC will be doing that. Currently, DDC is the only one handling this for Yahoo.

Yahoo did make a point to say that this could change if and when the Yahoo-Microsoft deal works out. But until then, this is the way search ads in BOSS will be handled.

This week, I am on a special trip known as the Blogger Delegation to Israel. We are being taken around by the Israeli Consulate to learn about Israel and the people who live here. Clearly, my focus is on search – so when I went to the Weizmann Institute today and met with extreme experts in the field of nanotechnology, alternative sustainable energy and even plant sciences, my main question was – what databases do you use for your research.

As I listened to information that was clearly way above my head, i.e. a new onion like molecule that when used in your car, it would never require an oil change again – I kept wondering, how can other scientists and researchers use this information to help their studies. How can researchers quickly pull up data, with citations, to find information at their finger tips.

So when I spoke with Professor David Cahen, he told me about his meetings with Google and trying to convince them to build out a search engine that does just that. In fact, he is on a personal crusade to educate the average person out there that much of the information out there on the web is either wrong or can be used wrong. His dream search engine would return accurate information, with citations listed, to your questions on how much energy does it consume to burn a certain amount of oil. Google is on their way to showing information on energy topics, such as their Power Meter that is designed to educate consumers about their power consumption. The issue is, according to Profession Cahen, it isn’t always accurate.

Cahen’s issue, in my opinion, is that Google cannot possible allocate their resources to building out a specialty database for this cause. If the Professor can use tools such as Yahoo’s BOSS platform and feed the data to BOSS, it might work well for his purpose. The main issue is that the professor does not have the time and resources to collect and feed this data to a search engine.

I was incredibly impressed with the work Ron Milo did with BioNumbers. Ron Milo is actually building a community of researchers, who add and edit (almost in Wiki style) to his specialty database. Milo’s main issue is getting his “pet project” out there to his community. What came to mind immediately was Google Coop’s Topics program. I cannot tell you how frustrated I was to hear that Ron Milo never heard of it. Why do I say that? Because Ron Milo is the exact person Google wants to use this service. Ron has built a structured data set that can easily be added to this Google project and might build out more awareness of BioNumbers.

Why is awareness of BioNumbers important to search? Google, no matter how good I find it to be, still has issues accessing structure data. Google Coop was one of Google’s answers, as is Google Base, Google Blog Search and so on. Yahoo BOSS or Search Monkey is another answer to these questions. BioNumbers can be expanded into other verticals, such as ChemiNumbers or GeoNumbers and so on. Getting experts to contribute to these specialty databases and Google and Yahoo educating these researchers on the tools they have to help build awareness of the answers the databases have, is incredibly important to furthering all sciences. Bridging the two, is a win-win for both the search engine and the researchers.

Here is a short video demonstrating some of the answers BioNumbers gives searchers:

The only issue is, resources – and who can the search engine serve best with those resources. The average consumer or the researchers? In this case, researchers need to build these data sets and feed them to a search engine. Search engines need to better educate these types of organizations about the tools they have that can unlock the data these researchers seek.

TechCrunch is one of the first to deploy a “vertical lens” on their site. TechCrunch’s solution searches technology-focused articles on both TechCrunch.com and across Yahoo’s web index. So this helps improve TechCrunch’s internal site search, and also give searchers other relevant search results that are not found on TechCrunch’s domain. Here is a picture that shows how TechCrunch implemented this BOSS technology:

Yahoo Boss Vertical Lens on TechCrunch

When we questioned Yahoo as to why they dropped Search Builder for BOSS, Yahoo told us:

BOSS vertical search engine is more powerful. Not only it can support Search Builder’s functionality, it has the following features

• It gets “structured” content from customer sites to allow searchers to navigate and refine their searches.
• It gets proprietary content in real time; the content is searchable immediately
• It builds a vertical lens of the web for the customer and blends the results from this lens with the customer data.
• It customizes ranking based on customer needs: ranking can be recency based, popularity based, or social based

Personally, I have been a Google Custom Search Engine user, but I am very interested in giving Yahoo’s solution a try on some of my sites.

Site Search is Google’s on-site tool for individual websites; you use it to add a search engine to your own website. The new feature, On-Demand Indexing, lets site owners tell Google to index their site by clicking a button, rather than waiting for Google to do it on its own schedule.

A Google spokesperson tells us that this has no impact whatsoever on a site’s indexing and ranking on the main Google.com search engine:

“This feature allows site owners to update search results on their website On-Demand, by adding them to a special, separate index for their own site. Pages indexed with On-Demand Indexing do not impact the ranking or indexing of pages on Google.com.”

There’s more on Techmeme about Google Site Search.

Meanwhile, it looks like Yahoo’s site search tool, Yahoo Search Builder, has been taken down. It used to be available at builder.search.yahoo.com, but that URL now redirects to Yahoo Search. We have an email in to Yahoo, and will update this post as we learn more.

UPDATE: Yahoo tells us that, in order to “focus on core strategic priorities and deliver a superior user experience,” Yahoo Search Builder was closed down as of September 30, 2008. Says Yahoo: “Most of the functionality provided by Search Builder is available through two other Yahoo! Search services: SearchMonkey and BOSS.”

The Yahoo Featured Search Builder box looks like this:

As an FYI, Google also features their Google Custom Search Engine engines in their Google Picks.