Who’s the BOSS?
| Thursday, July 10th, 2008 | --Sean |
"If you want a job done right, do it yourself." It's a nice sentiment, but in the world of, say, search engine development, doing it yourself is a daunting prospect. I mean, have you tried to crawl the Internet on your own? Index the billions of interesting sites out there? Parse pages for keywords, figure out what relevancy means, come up with a compelling name with two 'O's in it (I mean, hey, it worked for Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft)? There are tons of people out there with good ideas about how to revolutionize search online, but their ideas will never amount to anything without the infrastructure behind them.
"If you want a job done right, do it yourself, and let us help." That's the idea behind BOSS (Build your Own Search Service), which offers up a fast and convenient interface to our search results, where you're not only allowed but actually encouraged to remix and reproduce them in any way that you like. As far as my understanding goes, the general model is that you'd take a query on your own search site, and 1) perform some number of interesting BOSS queries to fill out a collection of interesting sites to consider (based on vanilla Yahoo! search results in chunks of up to 50 to whichever queries you provide through BOSS), 2) apply whatever metrics or extra information you have about those sites in order to reorder the results to your liking, 3) ???, and 4) PROFIT! Or display your own interpretation of unique and relevant search results, but that probably converges pretty well with profiting.
A somewhat separate project is BOSS Custom, which is a beefed up custom site search with a much deeper level of access to our underlying search technologies. That's my understanding, at least. This one is drawing a ton of interesting partners (maybe that's why TechCrunch is giving us a break today) and hopefully that level of openness with the levers and pulleys of Yahoo! Search will also leak out to BOSS Standard. I'd love to see us offer APIs that expose a few more details about backlinks, site reputation, or whatever other interesting things compose our secret search stew.
So, in general, this is a pretty cool announcement about letting you, the boutique search developer, be the BOSS. Also, it's an amazing logo.
EDIT: I like this post, which discusses some of the origins behind and future plans for BOSS.