It’s been a long year since Yahoo’s major search API changes. One of its popular offerings, the Yahoo BOSS API, was marked for transition to a paid service after integrating search results from Microsoft Bing. In April of this year, Yahoo BOSS V2 was released with pricing details, OAuth support and optional Advertising. Users have reacted positively to the changes and Yahoo has responded back with updates to BOSS V2 and a very short timeline to upgrade apps from V1.
TigerLogic, the company behind the yolink API, released a WordPress plugin that allows WordPress users to get a lot more done while searching within a WordPress blog. As many WordPress users know all too well, the existing search functionality of WordPress is subpar. Yolink changes that, offering faster results, and more relevant ones.
You probably have a ton of stuff on the Internet, all contained within your “digital life stream”, spread across a seemingly unending list of web services and social networks. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to search through all of that, Google style? Enter Greplin, almost certainly named after the Unix grep command, taking the many service inputs and piping them to its search tool.
It looked like Yahoo BOSS was dead 18 months ago, when the Microsoft search deal was announced. Behind the scenes, Yahoo has been re-tooling its Yahoo BOSS API, which lets developers Build their Own Search Service. With a re-launch coming next month, it has released technical documentation, which includes changes to authentication, the option to use ads from the service, as well as introductory prices for the service.
During the past four months we’ve seen not one but two well known real-time search engines disappear. First there was OneRiot, which in October 2010 decided to focus on advertising. More recently, Collecta closed it’s real-time search engine and API to focus on alternative real-time products. Digging further into real-time search offerings you will also discover that crowdeye has also decided to pull its real-time search engine. This now appears to leave Topsy, and of course Google as the main players focusing on building a real-time search destination. Does this trend signal the end for all real-time search engines or just that their focus has been wrong?
Computational knowledge engineWolfram Alpha has just become more accessible from a variety of applications. Wolfram Alpha has thrown open access to its API to all developers with version 2.0 of its Wolfram Alpha API, allowing you to integrate its results into a variety of sources of web, desktop, enterprise and mobile applications.
Those worried about the longevity of their tweets have another reason to relax. The Social Archive, which also stores status messages for many StatusNet-powered sites, is entering the Twitter search game. It joins Topsy, Tweet Scan and Twitter’s own search engine, which received a recent upgrade.
MapQuest has launched another API on top of OpenStreetMap (OSM), the Wiki-like editable map of the world. The new search service provides geographic search results for any data added to OSM, such as streets or landmarks. Of note, the MapQuest API provides the service without any API Key requirements or rate limiting.
Yahoo has revealed more details on its Yahoo Search BOSS, which is undergoing a major transition due to the Yahoo and Microsoft Search alliance. It had previously announced the move to a paid version of BOSS, which stands for Build your Own Search Service. Details have now emerged, with timelines and a pricing structure.
Ever wondered what impact your active presence on the Web has? For example, when you write a blog post or tweet about something, you may be interested in how many tweets your post receives and how many users can potentially reach your post. There are many ways to measure your social impact, however, to cover all social channels and platforms can be difficult to achieve. A Silicon Valley based company BackType builds an analytics platform that helps you understand your social impact at large.
BackType’s major goal is to give users a very comprehensive view of all social media. Today, it supports over one million sites and networks including Twitter and Facebook. When your app wants to get all the data that comes from Twitter, you can use the Twitter’s Streaming API which is the subject to various limits. BackType, however, belongs among those few that have the unlimited access to the full Twitter firehose. It can access more than 50 million tweets a day coursing through Twitter.
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