Yahoo! has taken another bold step today by introducing BOSS - "Build your Own Search Service" as the next phase in its Open Strategy. This follows April's SearchMonkey offering, as it will allow anyone to build a customised search service on top of Yahoo!'s search technology.Yahoo! describes BOSS as an open search web services platform that is designed to foster innovation in the search industry. A loft aim indeed. The idea is that developers, start-ups and large internet companies will be able to use BOSS to develop and launch web-scale serach products that are able to utilize the entire Yahoo! Search index - meaning people will have access to Yahoo!'s crawling, indexing, ranking and relevancy algorithms.
Two search services have already switched over to use Yahoo! to power their web results: social site search Me.dium and natural language processing site Hakia. Hakia is actually using it as a supplement to its own search technology and runs results through their proprietary SemanticRank algorithm. This allows them, for example, to display Yahoo!'s image results alongside their own web index results; a system that is too flexible for the bigger search engines to allow.
Before you think that this may lead to users having the opportunity to find out Yahoo!'s ranking signals, it won't, but it does allow developers to add their own to the set of results. Also, although Yahoo! won't require anyone to mention that they are using their technology, later on developers will be required to display Yahoo!'s ads next to or within their results. The main goal of this isn't to drive traffic back to Yahoo! itself, but to spread Yahoo!'s technological influence throughout the mass of the web.
When asked about how Yahoo! felt about other uses of this API, such as search marketers tools powered by search results data, they told digital news site Search Engine Land:
"You are permitted to use the Services only for the purpose of incorporating and displaying Web Search Results from such Services as part of a Search Product deployed on your Web site ("Your Offering"). A "Search Product" means a service which provides a response to a search query, keyword or other request served from an index or indexes of data related to Web pages generated, in whole or in part, by the application of an algorithmic search engine."
Yahoo! will be monitoring use of the API by looking at data such as how many queries have resulted in clicks. They go on to say that they are looking at potentially making other data offerings available that may be of interest to SEOs.
This is indeed a very interesting move by Yahoo! It's a sign of the company's commitment to the developer community and of their creative thinking towards market share, but only time will tell if it will result in the shake-up of the market share its hoping for.
