The idea behind Yahoo BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is to let developers combine Yahoo’s search index with their own applications. Now, a few tweaks should improve the process, and Yahoo has also made it more “professional” by moving away from the idea of offering everything for free.
Let’s start with the stuff that is best for users. Ashim Chhabra wrote on the Yahoo Search Blog, “Perhaps the most important component of what we’re releasing today is access to SearchMonkey structured data through the BOSS API. The primary way in which SearchMonkey acquires structured data is by using the Yahoo! Web Crawler to scour the web for embedded semantic markup such as microformats or RDF. Starting today, all this data is available to BOSS API users.”
Next, Chhabra seemed pleased to make “Long Abstracts” available. This will essentially bring 300-character page descriptions into the mix, whereas developers were stuck with 170 characters beforehand. Finally, Site Explorer info about inlinks for domains and URLs will become available through two new BOSS services.
Not bad, eh? And really, neither are the new BOSS usage fees. Even as Yahoo’s only going to charge developers who see more than 10,000 queries a day, the cost per unit after that is just $0.10. Plus, while all of the nice, new features should be available immediately, the pricing change isn’t supposed to take place until sometime late in the second quarter.
It’s hard to say what effect these developments will have on the adoption of BOSS and Yahoo’s revenue stream, but they look like steps in the right direction.
