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Jimmy Wales: The New Wikia Search API “Is Like Facebook Apps For Search Results.”
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Web Search APIs from Yahoo! Search Web Services – YDN
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Related Suggestion
The Related Suggestion service returns suggested queries to extend the power of a submitted query, providing variations on a theme to help you dig deeper.
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There are three levels to the BOSS program. The first is a self-service API, which will be available to partners who want to build their own search engine using Yahoo results as a base. Examples could include social, vertical, or visual search engines. The second is an API program for academics, dubbed BOSS University. Yahoo is partnering with the computer science departments of several top universities to allow them to use the BOSS program in their research.
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The third tier is BOSS Custom, a program where Yahoo will work with a very limited set of partners to customize their integration of Yahoo’s results into their own search engines. These partners will generally fit into two main categories, Raghavan said. The first includes companies with their own ranking and/or presentation methodologies, such as semantic search engine Hakia. Hakia is using Yahoo’s results, to which it applies its own “secret sauce,” he said. Hakia is not replacing its own indexing process completely, but rather using BOSS to accelerate the process.
The other category of partner includes companies with proprietary data, such as user profiles or behavior, that can be used to affect search results. One such company is Me.dium, a browser toolbar that lets users connect with each other and find related sites recommended based on other users’ surfing habits. Me.dium will use Yahoo’s BOSS data to create a social search engine that will rank results based on what its users say is important.
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Yahoo! Search Blog: BOSS — The Next Step in our Open Search Ecosystem
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Our goal with BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is simple — foster innovation in the search landscape. As anyone who follows the search industry knows, the barriers to successfully building a high quality, web-scale search engine are incredibly high. Doing so requires hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in engineering, sciences and core infrastructure — from crawling and indexing technology to relevancy and machine learning algorithms, to stuff as mundane as data centers, servers and power. Because competing successfully in web search requires an investment of this scale, new players have effectively been prohibited from delivering credible alternatives to Yahoo! and Google. We believe the BOSS platform will begin to change that.
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- Ability to re-rank and blend results — BOSS partners can re-rank search results as they see fit and blend Yahoo!’s results with proprietary and other web content in a single search experience
- Total flexibility on presentation — Freedom to present search results using any user interface paradigm, without Yahoo! branding or attribution requirements
- BOSS Mashup Framework — We’re releasing a Python library and UI templates that allow developers to easily mashup BOSS search results with other public data sources
- Web, news and image search — At launch, developers will have access to web, news and image search and we’ll be adding more verticals soon
- Unlimited queries — There are no rate limits on the number of queries per day
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In addition to a self-serve API, we’re also partnering with a handful of Internet companies with large user bases or unique assets to collaboratively develop next gen search products using Yahoo!’s full suite of search technology. To learn more about BOSS Custom, click here.
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Why would Yahoo! open up its search infrastructure and technology to developers, entrepreneurs and companies who could use it to compete with us? It’s really quite simple. First, we believe that being open is core to Yahoo!’s future success — opening our network, opening our own search experience via SearchMonkey, and now opening our search infrastructure via BOSS — will lead to innovation both on Yahoo! and powered by Yahoo!. For BOSS, we see a virtuous circle in which partners deliver innovative search experiences, and as they grow their audiences and usage we have more data that can be used to improve our own Yahoo! Search experience and as a result, improve the quality of results our BOSS partners and their users get. Second, we do see new revenue streams from BOSS. In the coming months, we’ll be launching a monetization platform for BOSS that will enable Yahoo! to expand its ad network and enable BOSS partners to jointly participate in the compelling economics of search.
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Our hope is that the resulting expansion in user choice will have the effect of fragmenting the increasingly consolidated search market in much the same way that cable TV dramatically increased programming choices for television viewers.
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Yahoo Opens Up Search Results – Search Engine Watch (SEW)
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Under the “Search Monkey” open search platform, users who turn on a Yahoo Search plug-in created by a publisher will see enhanced listings when the publisher’s site is returned on a Yahoo search results page. The plug-ins are intended to expose structured information, and provide more deep links into a site, images, or ratings and reviews, for example.
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- self-service API
- BOSS University for academics
- BOSS Custom, designed for companies with their own ranking and/or presentation methodologies. Or alternative, companies with proprietary data that can help as an additional signal that factors into relevancy.
Three levels, but only BOSS Custom has real potential for a highly differentiated service offering.
There are three levels to the BOSS program, according to SearchEngineWatch:
I’ll go over all the aspects of the BOSS program below, and then come back to BOSS Custom as evidence that Yahoo! just might Use The Force. But the basic features looks like a free version of Google Custom Search Engine.
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Crawling and Indexing: Not the real barrier to vertical search
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Building a repository of documents is only the beginning. The key is extracting meaning from the documents (and the relationships between the documents) to power your ranking algorithm.
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Me.dium is the example highlighted by Yahoo! Silicon Alley Insider points out that Me.dium is adding social signals to Yahoo! ranking and calling it “Social Search” which ironically is “using a name Yahoo! has already attached to a failed product.” VentureBeat has a more positive spin on the Me.dium demo application, although Dan Kaplan concludes:
The question that hangs over Yahoo, BOSS, and Me.dium is whether or not any search player will really be able to change user behavior and get people to consistently use something other than Google; the results would probably have to be a noticeable leap forward, and even then, it would be hard to break Googling habits.
Dan is absolutely right, and BOSS will have to go a lot further to deliver a true “leap forward.”
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As an added plus, Yahoo! is providing the BOSS Mashup Framework. According to Yahoo! Search Blog: “We’re releasing a Python library and UI templates that allow developers to easily mashup BOSS search results with other public data source”
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Real-time indexing is appropriate for time-sensitive information like news and blogs. This could be an advantage over other wholesale crawling and indexing methods that other private label providers are providing.
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Integrating query suggestions (Search Assist technology)
Query parsing services is one of the most interesting aspects of BOSS Custom. Search Assist is very well done already, and if it could be integrated with our custom, industry-specific ontology.
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There are many ways of making search results more relevant. One is to understand the user intention better and refine the search, which structured search addresses. Another way is to build the ontology/taxonomy/directory to classify queries and documents, which can benefit from the categorizer.
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Crawling is not a barrier to vertical search engine. It is true. However, first, it still makes an under-funded startup to get start easily; second, Yahoo data helps on time-sensitive data; third, some startups may want to try semi-horizontal market, such as content for kids and shopping, which is more costly to crawl.
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Huanjin: In general, I think this is a very important event for all search startups. It opens new opportunities. Google has pushed search relevance to the limit that the current approach can achieve. To significantly improve the search relevance, we have to take drastically different approaches, i.e., not solely by keyword matching, not solely by statistical signals, and not treating every user the same. My take on the direction of search technology is
(1) Meaning based (semantic and/or syntactic).
(2) Context aware. The same word means different things in different contexts.
(3) Must be able to treat different users differently
(4) Opinion based.
(5) Leverage human knowledge base
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The BOSS Custom roadmap needs to envision supporting these innovative approaches, because that is the only way that new startups can create a reason for people to leave their horizontal search engine like Google and adopt an alternative.
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Andrew: “The extreme approach – well not even that extreme these days, given Facebook – would be to let developers build extensions to the search engine that actually run on top of the *.yahoo.com domain. They can provide an API, do app approvals, and direct only small bits of traffic to each app to test them out – then ramp up the ones that perform better than anything else. There are difficult pieces necessary to make this work, but if done well, it has the potential to change the search game by letting developers target small groups of queries the way that advertisers have been able to.”
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Most niche search engines lack a traffic strategy that envisions coexisting with Google and Yahoo! Getting search traffic from existing engines needs to be a component of their business vision, as it is with Uptake.
Beyond that, discoverability has been the biggest issue for the alternative search engines. ASE’s underestimate the brand loyalty that Google has earned that goes beyond the real advantage in search quality. If Yahoo! could play a role in that discoverability, through Search Monkey and other programs, that could be an advantage to the alts AND also to Yahoo!
This is a two step process. Open up search through BOSS Custom to allow innovation to bloom. Then harness that innovation back into differentiating Yahoo! as a search and discovery platform that leverages this innovation to be different from Google. Yahoo! funnels traffic to BOSS alts, but then consumers use Yahoo! and build brand preference to Yahoo! and its rag-tag Rebel Alliance fleet!
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Yahoo! Search BOSS Custom – YDN
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- Near real-time indexing of public or proprietary content
- Blending training datasets to produce advanced, customized ranking models that scale to the Web
- Federating web and proprietary content in a single search display
- Integrating query suggestions (Search Assist technology)
- Leveraging highly trained query and document categorizers
- Structured search (range queries, refinement)
- And much, much more
What are BOSS Custom’s capabilities?
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BOSS Custom implementations are aimed at established consumer web companies with unique assets (e.g., user data, novel technology) that would be able to develop high-scale search products.
If your company does not fit this description, please consider the BOSS API.
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Yahoo! Search brings Search Assist, SearchMonkey, and more to the iPhone
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In June, my boss came to me with a challenge: bring the full Yahoo! Search experience—including SearchMonkey, Search Assist, shortcuts, and other awesome Yahoo! Search features—to the iPhone with as few compromises as possible. He wanted an iPhone search experience that matched the desktop experience and took full advantage of Mobile Safari’s excellent featureset. And he wanted it in a month.
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- Search Assist saves you time by completing your queries before you’ve finished typing them
- All your favorite SearchMonkey modules will follow you from your desktop browser to your iPhone (just make sure you’re logged into your Yahoo! account on your iPhone)
- Movie showtimes, weather, local results, breaking news, Flickr photos, and other useful Yahoo! Search shortcuts are now at your fingertips
- Other helpful features like Quick Links, same-host indent, and more
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Yahoo Is Inviting Partners to Build on Its Search Technology – NYTimes.com
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Me.dium offers a service in which users can see what Web sites their friends are visiting. That allows the company to collect information about what sites have “buzz” at any given time, said Kimbal Musk, the company’s chief executive. Me.dium will use that information to rearrange and supplement Yahoo’s search results, creating a service that captures the “social zeitgeist” of the Web, Mr. Musk said.
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“We think that for a good percentage of searches, we’ll get people to where they want to go a lot faster than regular search engines,” Mr. Musk said. He said it would have been impossible for Me.dium to create a search service on its own.
Yahoo estimates that it would cost $300 million to build a search service from scratch.
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Yahoo executives acknowledged that the new strategy, if successful, could cannibalize Yahoo’s own search business. But they said that if a search start-up became popular, it would probably take more users away from Google than from Yahoo, as Google has a far larger share of the market.
“We did a lot of analysis,” said Bill Michels, senior director for Yahoo’s open search platform. “We are comfortable with the risks associated with it.”
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