Yahoo Offers Open Source Search With BOSS

Yahoo is opening up its search engine vault and letting third parties develop customized Web searches using its own technology. Build your Own Search Service (BOSS) encourages start-ups, Web developers and anyone else to build and launch Web-scale search products that take advantage of the Yahoo Search index. Yahoo is giving the keys to its crawling and indexing capabilities along with ranking and relevancy algorithms to developers in the hopes to increase its own search market share while encouraging the next step in search engine functionality.

The Yahoo Blog states that the biggest entry barrier for potential budding search companies is money. Giving access to a preexisting infrastructure affectively removes that barrier and allows developers to focus on getting their search algorithms right.

Trying to compete with search engines like Google and Yahoo requires, "hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in engineering, sciences and core infrastructure -- from crawling and indexing technology to relevancy and machine learning algorithms, to stuff as mundane as data centers, servers and power," Yahoo writes on its blog.

"Because competing successfully in web search requires an investment of this scale, new players have effectively been prohibited from delivering credible alternatives to Yahoo and Google," Yahoo said.

BOSS is calculated to remove those obstacles and allow people with the desire to innovate Web search.

Speaking to Reuters, Prabhakar Raghavan, the chief strategist for Yahoo Search, said that the motivation behind BOSS is simple. "We want to disrupt the search market by removing that entry barrier and make room for more players and more ideas," Raghavan said.

Currently Google holds approximately 62 percent of the U.S. Web search market, while Yahoo maintains 21 percent, according to Reuters.

Raghavan and Yahoo believe that BOSS will allow the development of industry and social specific searches. Healthcare search, for example, is one area Raghavan believes that a start-up can develop a useful search tool for a specific industry. The potential for a social aspect of search is also something Yahoo isn't ruling out, with the results being ordered based on what a user's friends find interesting.

Yahoo already has two partners on the BOSS bandwagon. Me.dium is a personalized search start-up and Hakia is a leading semantic search engine.

The company has previously offered a search API to developers -- and the concept isn't new to the industry -- however, companies looking to use an existing API have traditionally been restricted in their access. By using BOSS, developers have unlimited queries per day, no restrictions on presentation, re-ordering is allowed, blending of proprietary and Yahoo search content is allowed.

Monetization, a potentially tricky issue with BOSS, is currently unavailable, but is coming soon. According to Reuters, Yahoo will require their own ads to be run alongside search results in exchange for the tools they provide.

Source:crn.com