Yahoo BOSS Switching To Paid Model In Early 2011

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 depend on if you are querying web, image, news or other information. Yahoo said they plan on offering BOSS v1, the free version, for free 60 days after BOSS v2, the paid version, is launched – which is expected in early 2011.

Here are the key points as mentioned by Yahoo:

• BOSS will continue to be a RESTful API for web, image, and news search. Core web and image results will eventually be powered by the Microsoft search platform. In 2011, Yahoo! plans to expand upon these offerings.
• BOSS plans to provide full flexibility to blend, stack, and re-rank results. You know your users best, so we will give you the ability to display exactly what they need. We also aim to continue enhancing the BOSS offering by providing additional vertical search services in the future.
• We will require developers to access BOSS V2 via the Yahoo! Developer Network standard oAuth-based authentication.
• BOSS V2 will provide a self-service payment model. We plan to offer developers the ability to add credit-card authentication at sign-up and to check usage, billing, and other information on a completely redesigned dashboard interface.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.