Yahoo’s the BOSS? Maybe of Developer Search

Romin Irani, December 7th, 2011

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Yahoo! BOSS, the Build Your Own Search Service, has seen a series of upheavals in the last two years. When Yahoo! announced its Search partnership with Microsoft, it looked that Yahoo! BOSS might not survive for long. However, that was not the case. Yahoo! BOSS has come back strongly this year with paid version V2 and major updates to the BOSS API. In a sign that it is alive and kicking, it has announced a new home for Search BOSS and three new product offerings under the BOSS umbrella along with API updates.

Yahoo! Search BOSS has a brand new home page with the focus on being a one stop site providing information on how to create the complete search experience using the new BOSS Hosted Search Service. The new site also coincides with the launch of three new product offerings that address requirements of site developers, publishers/blogger and hosting companies that need to provide search.

The three product offerings are:

• BOSS Hosted Search: This is a free-of-charge web search service that you can sign up in minutes, customize it for your look&feel and search parameters. You get a snippet of code that you can embed in your site and have web search integrated in your web site.
• BOSS Site Search: This service provides search for your site content. You can optionally chose to monetize your site by showing relevant ads. This service can be optimally combined with the BOSS Shortcuts to provide contextual search that is relevant to your content and keeps the users engaged at your site. This service is in Private Alpha.
• BOSS Shortcuts: This service offers contextual text search for your content. It analyses your content, determines the content that is most likely to engage the users and provide those results from your site, web and their Ad marketplace as a popup. This service is currently in Private Alpha and available in US, Canada, UK and India.

The BOSS API has got some updates too. In addition to 10 new markets, you can now integrate Ads much easily. Both the ads and search results with be delivered from the same service.

For more information about Yahoo! BOSS, visit the new home page.