Yahoo's BOSS touts its search site creations

A month after the launch of BOSS--an application programming interface that lets developers build a customized search engine atop Yahoo's technology--the company is showing off mashups built using the product.

Yahoo's Build Your Own Search Service interface allows Web users to build an independent search Web site, send search queries to Yahoo, and process and display the results in various formats, while boosting Yahoo's search-ad business.

So far, the ideas have been related to news and sports search, as well as general search. 4HourSearch, which CNET News touched on briefly last week, took four hours to build with a combination of BOSS and Yahoo User Interface design tools. It spits out Yahoo search results in a style reminiscent of Cuil, and cleverly lists on the front page that it "surfs enough sites."

But some of the more interesting mashups are aiming to aid niche Web users. For sports lovers, the PlayerSearch sports search engine pulls in content from a host of sources, displaying search results in categories such as podcasts, videos, national news and columns, Flickr photos, or stories from The Onion.

The mashup winner, as declared by Yahoo BOSS bloggers, was Dipity, which also showed off its meme timeline Thursday.

The site paired its timeline application with Daylife News, using the BOSS API to make NewsLine. By comparing two topics (John McCain versus Barack Obama) or simply searching for news about one topic, the search results are rendered in timeline form and as a unique perspective.

Yahoo promises that even more mashups, and perhaps new popular search sites, are on the way.