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Yahoo! invites developers to fight Google

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CIOL Bureau
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publive-image SUNNYVALE, USA: Yahoo! Inc. today introduced a new open Web services platform, Yahoo! Search BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service), which gives third parties access to Yahoo! Search Technology, including the ability to re-rank and control the presentation of Web search results.

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Search BOSS, available today as an API in beta, enables developers and companies to build custom search experiences and disrupt the search industry, Yahoo! said in a statement.

Analysts see Yahoo!'s Search BOSS initiative as the firm's bid to collectively stop the Google juggernaut, by roping in developers and start-ups.

This would help start-ups to build search engines with little investment.

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Search BOSS extends Yahoo!'s Open Strategy by giving access to one of the most valuable assets on the Web, the Yahoo! Search infrastructure and technology. This builds on another recent launch of Yahoo!'s SearchMonkey developer platform, which opened up the Yahoo! search results page to allow site owners and developers to create enhanced search results.

"Today, the search market is generally limited to three major search engines to drive innovation and growth," said Prabhakar Raghavan, chief strategist for Yahoo! Search. "BOSS opens up the playing field for developers and companies to disrupt the search market, become principals in search and build new Web search experiences that offer more choice for users."

BOSS provides developers and companies access to its algorithmic search infrastructure without incurring the significant costs required to build Web-scale search experiences. By using the BOSS platform, partners have the opportunity to provide industry leading search results.

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BOSS allows for control over the presentation and ranking of Web search results as well as unlimited queries per day. Its framework allows developers to blend Yahoo! Search results from Web, news and image indexes with any data source from across the Web. Over time, other Yahoo! Search indexes will become available.

Over the next several months, a BOSS monetization capability, using Yahoo! search advertising and potentially other models, will be made available for partners and developers to create a search revenue stream for their business.

BOSS will offer two options for companies and developers. Today, developers can begin using the BOSS API and the mash-up framework tools and see examples of how they could deploy BOSS on their sites by visiting the Yahoo! Developer Network site.

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The self-service API allows developers to quickly get started in creating new Web search experiences.

The BOSS Custom service will be offered to select partners with large-scale needs in building and supporting Web search experiences.

Yahoo! has also partnered with top technology universities to drive search experimentation, innovation and research for search.

It is currently working with the Carnegie Mellon University, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Purdue University, Stanford University, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMASS).

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