Be your own search BOSS

Posted July 9th, 2008 at 10:37 pm by Prabhakar Raghavan, Yahoo! Labs

 3 Comments / Filed in: Trends & News

When the Web first appeared, people browsed for the sheer serendipitous kick of it, but soon the Web became a place to get things done. Web search has witnessed a similar transformation: search engines have graduated from fielding ego queries to becoming the starting point for being productive. While search engines have evolved with these changing needs, we think search technology is far from mature.

What if your favorite news site had a search engine you could turn to when news breaks that not only surfaces the best articles on that topic, but also the most relevant content from across the Web? Or what if your search engine understood your social relationships or your site preferences and presented results with that in mind? When you’re searching for new music, wouldn’t it be nice if there was a search engine that knew your and your friends’ taste in music, drew in reviews from across the Web, and recommended songs you might enjoy?

Today we’re announcing a service that brings ideas like these a bit closer to reality.

Yahoo! Search BOSS, which stands for Build Your Own Search Service, is a new open Web services platform from Yahoo! Search that will allow developers and companies of all sizes to leverage one of the most valuable assets on the Web, the Yahoo! Search infrastructure. It lets them realize their own vision of what a search experience should be, enabling unlimited mash-ups and disrupting the search landscape.

BOSS will enable developers and companies to easily enter the search industry –- without large capital or resource expenditures — unleashing a wave of search innovation beyond any one of today’s search principals. Now anyone –- your favorite shopping site, an entrepreneur with a great idea or a start-up developer –- can tap into Yahoo!’s technology to create their own Web search experience without the infrastructure or talent resources needed to create one from scratch.

The result is that you’ll have more choice and flexibility in finding whatever you’re looking for on the Web –- just as you now have far more programming options with cable TV than when there were just three networks. (For examples of how BOSS technology can be used or to get started building your own search engine, visit the Yahoo! Developer Network.)

Stay tuned for more to come on how we are fundamentally changing the way you search.

Prabhakar Raghavan
Chief Strategist for Yahoo! Search

Tagged: BOSS, open source, search

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3 Comments Add your own

Ayodeji Ilesanmi | July 11th, 2008 at 2:08 am

good Idea here. hope Nigerians Are not left out of the show? we really need to take advantage of this cutting edge solution.

Derick Harris | July 11th, 2008 at 1:10 pm

TAKING BOSS ONE STEP FURTHER

I hope to encourage Yahoo! Research to work with me on a new API that allows anyone with a BOSS API account to leverage a unique network of Interchangeable Master Channels (IMCs) that is presently layered across the public Internet in the dot-com name space.

IMCs is a simple concept with huge potential dividends: namely, Internet end users can create a COMMON AND DEDICATED (brand specific) search engine at BOSS and then place their dedicated search engine or “bosspod” in an appropriate GENERIC brand channel attached to a brand specific IMC.

The IMC master channels all resolve at level three. The present network of GENERIC IMC “pods” (as in airpod.com which is only one of hundreds of generic dot-com “pods”) can thereby accommodate every aviation related brand name entity anywhere on earth.

Thus, a person who creates a search engine centered around, say, qantas.airpod.com or united.airpod.com can legally build a DEDICATED search engine for civil aviation that is centered around a particular brand name.

It therefore follows that this AGGREGATED network with hundreds of dedicated (brand specific) dot-com “bosspods” will be able to accommodate in a unique search engine network created by ordinary Internet – a unique information utility that has a dedicated search engine for almost every conceivable brand name entity, anywhere on earth.

Hundreds of dot-com master channels layered across the public Internet thereby means that (potentially) tens of thousands of BOSS-type search engines that can be placed inside dot-com brand channels, easily reachablke with any popular browser. All that is requires is to type the name of the brand being searched adjacent the appropriate dot-com “pod” as in for example, borders.bookpod.com, or chrysler.carpod.com, and so on and so forth.

The same “bosspods” process applies to country names, regional names, city names and even zip codes and postal codes anywhere in the world – because Cyber ID has already secured all the necessary dot-com master channels.

The necessary dot-com network of (IMC) “bosspods” is already in place. All that is required is for ordinary people to be able to download the COMMON API (when it is ready)from Yahoo! and then register their search engine with Cyber ID, which owns the IMC network, and also with Yahoo! for shared advertising revenues.

Anyone interested in creating their own brand centered search engine should contact Yahoo!Research and ask the
author of this particular “Yodel Anecdotal” to get in touch with me.

Derick H.
Cyber ID

Kartik | July 12th, 2008 at 11:33 am

Hi
I signed up for a app id for yahoo boss and now i really dont get how to use it
Is there any dev. package to download (PHP) that has some examples or you gotta read the online documentation for building an app