When Yahoo announced BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) in 2008, the company said it planned to make money from the service. On Wednesday, though, the company announced it's got a new way in mind: charging for high-volume use of the search data.
Yahoo will charge for use of the BOSS API (application programming interface), the service by which other Web sites can extract Yahoo's search data then repurpose it to their hearts' content, according to a blog post by Ashim Chhabra of Yahoo's Search BOSS team. Previously, the company had planned to make money from BOSS by requiring outsiders with high-traffic sites to show Yahoo search ads next to their results.
The new approach allows companies to pursue their own monetization strategies and will help make the API itself more useful by lifting constraints, Chhabra said.
"We're introducing fees for a couple of reasons. First and most importantly, we're hard at work on a number of technologies that will enhance both the functionality and performance of BOSS, and usage fees will help support this development," Chhabra said. "Second, we believe that introducing the proposed pricing structure will improve the ecosystem by optimizing capacity for our serious developers."
BOSS is one part of Yahoo's attempt to make its search more competitive with dominant rival Google, which gained market share over rivals in January, according to Nielsen Online.
One limit that's lifted will be the amount of search results that can be retrieved with one call to the BOSS API; with the fee structure, that limit goes from 50 to 1,000. Yahoo also will offer a service level agreement (SLA) so outsiders can count on BOSS working.
BOSS now can show Web sites' descriptive data spotlighted by Yahoo's SearchMonkey service.
(Credit: Yahoo)The new fees likely will go into effect late in the second quarter, according to the BOSS fee page; those who use the service will pay on the basis of 10-cent units. For example, retrieving the first 100 results for 1,000 searches costs 10 units; developers will get 30 free credits a day, and the rate goes down during off-peak hours.
SearchMonkey injection
Yahoo also announced it's grafting some SearchMonkey technology into BOSS. SearchMonkey can gussy up certain Yahoo search results in cases when the Web sites listed describe their own data with computer-oriented descriptions called microformats such as a restaurant indicating its address. This idea, called the "semantic Web" and long under development, theoretically gives computers a better understanding of what's on Web pages.
The BOSS API now can be set so that search data it retrieves spotlights that structured data, Chhabra said.
BOSS now also shows two other elements: longer 300-character descriptions of each page in search results, up from 170 characters, and some data retrieved by Yahoo's SiteExplorer technology, which can show details such as popular pages within a particular Web site or a list of other Web sites that link to it.
Search queries served by Yahoo's BOSS service have been steadily growing since the program's July launch.
(Credit: Yahoo)Yahoo's BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service), which lets others use the company's search technology, is getting some traction.
The service, announced in July, now handles 10 million queries per day, Yahoo announced Monday. And with Google still king of the heap, and Microsoft breathing down Yahoo's neck, the company needs every scrap of influence it can get in the search market.
"We believe growing to more than 100 queries a second in just over 5 months says something about the demand for an open search platform," Bill Michels of the BOSS Team said in a blog post.
"As a point of reference, the total queries from these developer-built, BOSS-powered search engines would rank ahead of the combined searches done on both Facebook and Amazon, and just behind Ask.com," Michels said, citing ComScore statistics.
BOSS queries don't count toward Yahoo's market share, but they could help the company out. That's because heavy-traffic partners using the search infrastructure must either show Yahoo search ads or sign some form of revenue-sharing partnership.
More changes will come to BOSS next year, including the revenue-sharing initiative. "Since launch, we've been focused on adding features and building up the ecosystem. We'll maintain that emphasis in 2009, as well as adding monetizing capabilities to the platform," Michels said.
With BOSS, partners get extensive leeway with Yahoo search results. They may reorder them, mix them with their own results, or filter out particular results, for example. Yahoo handles much of the heavy lifting, including crawling the Web, indexing the pages, and delivering the search results through the BOSS API (application programming interface).
Delver, a search start-up that personalizes search results by paying attention to a person's social connections, has signed up for Yahoo's BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service).
BOSS lets larger search sites use Yahoo's search results, tailored in any way desired but stripped of any Yahoo branding, in exchange for showing Yahoo ads or sharing revenue. Delver plans to mix those results in with its own technology, which shows results drawn from publicly visible parts of social sites such as profiles, blogs, bookmarks, and videos. Smaller sites and academic projects can use BOSS for free.
"Leveraging Yahoo Search BOSS allows us to keep focusing on social-graph ranking and indexing, while providing our users with a solution that intelligently mixes social results with traditional Web results," Delver Chief Executive Liad Agmon said in a statement Tuesday.
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.
It's a pity the National Security Agency can't talk about its computational challenges, because it's leaving a lot of the boasting rights to Google.
(Credit:
Paul Ford)
In a blog posting on Friday the company shared some detail about the challenges of one aspect of its search operation, the Web indexing and processing that must take place before the results are delivered to users. The short version: Google has no choice but to think big.
First comes surfing. "We start at a set of well-connected initial pages and follow each of their links to new pages. Then we follow the links on those new pages to even more pages and so on, until we have a huge list of links," said software engineers Jesse Alpert and Nissan Hajaj. "Even after removing...exact duplicates, we saw a trillion unique URLs, and the number of individual web pages out there is growing by several billion pages per day."
Next comes analyzing the "link graph"--the mathematical representation of what links to what. That's a key foundation of Google's PageRank algorithm, which brought the company's search engine to prominence by assigning importance to those pages that other important pages point toward.
In the early days of Google, computing PageRank for the company's collection of a mere 26 million pages took a workstation "a couple hours," and the results would be used for some unspecified period of time. Today, Google surfs the Web continuously and recalculates the link graph "several times per day."
"This graph of one trillion URLs is similar to a map made up of one trillion intersections. So multiple times every day, we do the computational equivalent of fully exploring every intersection of every road in the United States. Except it'd be a map about 50,000 times as big as the U.S., with 50,000 times as many roads and intersections," the engineers said.
Google likes to talk about how users have choice and competition just one click away, and that's a fair point. But the blog post also makes it even clearer just how high barriers to entry are in the search market. That's one of the reasons Yahoo's BOSS (build your own search service) program is intriguing: it lets search start-ups take advantage of Yahoo's crawling, indexing, and search technology in exchange for advertising or revenue-sharing partnerships.
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