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

Microsoft prepares to do battle to oust Yahoo's board of directors

Microsoftset the stage for a full-blown battle to overthrow Yahoo's board of directors yesterday when it declared it was interested in reopening talks to buy all or part of the internet company - but only if a new board was appointed first

The intervention, less than a month before Yahoo's annual meeting, gives backing to the flagging efforts of activist investor Carl Icahn to unseat Jerry Yang, Yahoo's chief executive, and the rest of the board that failed to reach agreement on Microsoft's earlier takeover offer.

It also breathes life into Microsoft's six-month battle with Yahoo, which had fallen into a lull in the three weeks since Yahoo reached a separate search advertising alliance with Google.

After that, Microsoft had left open a proposal of its own to acquire Yahoo's search business, although it had also said it was no longer interested in buying the whole company.

Yahoo's shares climbed by nearly 12 per cent on the news, to $23.89, though they remained below the $33 a share that Microsoft indicated in May it was prepared to pay.

The software developer said it had held talks with Mr Icahn "in the past week", apparently ending a long period in which it had kept its distance from the billionaire investor.

In a letter to Yahoo's board, Mr Icahn said he had spoken "frequently" to Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive, in the past week, in conversations that "lasted as long as an hour".

Microsoft said that, with another board in place, it would be interested in discussing a deal either to assume Yahoo's search function "with large financial guarantees" for the internet company, or to buy Yahoo outright.

The earlier offer for Yahoo's search business, in which Microsoft would have taken over the service and paid a percentage of the advertising money it received to Yahoo, did not include any revenue guarantees for Yahoo.

Yahoo said it was open to negotiating an offer from Microsoft but that, after an overture of its own last month, Mr Ballmer had said he was "no longer interested even in the price range [Microsoft] had previously indicated."

Turning Yahoo over to Mr Icahn so that he could sell the search business to Microsoft "at a price to be determined in a future 'negotiation'" would not be in the best interests of shareholders, it added.

Microsoft's decision to throw its weight behind Mr Icahn follows a war of words between the software group and Yahoo.

Google-Yahoo Search Ads Deal

In June 2000, Google became the default search engine provider for Yahoo. The agreement lasted until 2004, when Yahoo launched its own search engine. Yahoo realized that you can actually make money from search, so it acquired Overture, a company specialized in pay-per-click advertising that also owned two search engines: AltaVista and AlltheWeb. Unfortunately for Yahoo, it moved too slowly and Google became the leader in both search and PPC advertising.

Yahoo's decision to temporarily outsource some of its search ads to Google was predictable, especially after the two-week test from April. Instead of being acquired by Microsoft, Yahoo chose to partner with a company that has a better search ads system.

"Under the terms of the agreement, Yahoo! will select the search term queries for which - and the pages on which - Yahoo! may offer Google paid search results. (...) Yahoo! believes that this agreement will enable the Company to better monetize Yahoo!'s search inventory in the United States and Canada. At current monetization rates, this is an approximately $800 million annual revenue opportunity. In the first 12 months following implementation, Yahoo! expects the agreement to generate an estimated $250 million to $450 million in incremental operating cash flow. The agreement will enhance Yahoo!'s ability to achieve its goal to grow operating cash flow significantly, while at the same time providing flexibility to continue to invest in ongoing initiatives such as algorithmic search innovation and search and display advertising platforms. It gives Yahoo! complete flexibility to continue to use its Panama paid search results."

Yahoo gets a lot of value from this deal and is no longer pressured by investors to significantly improve the search ads. Even if the agreement has a term of up to ten years, I think this is a short-term deal and Yahoo is more motivated than ever to succeed on its own.

Google Blog is quick to announce that this isn't an anti-competitive move. "Yahoo! will remain in the business of search and content advertising, which gives the company a continued incentive to keep improving and innovating. Even during this agreement, Yahoo! can use our technology as much or as little as it chooses." Since the agreement is non-exclusive and Yahoo won't drop the search ads services, it's unlikely that the U.S. Department of Justice will block the deal.

In other related news, Google Talk users have a reason to rejoice. "Yahoo! and Google agreed to enable interoperability between their respective instant messaging services, bringing easier and broader communication to users." Hopefully, this will actually happen, since the previous agreements with AOL and eBay didn't produce any visible effect and there's still no interoperability with AIM and Skype.
Source: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com