Yahoo Search Boss

About two months ago, Yahoo first announced Yahoo Search Boss - (Boss stands for Build your Own Search Service). Yahoo Boss is an open search web services platform that aims to foster innovation in the search industry. Developers, small start-ups, and large Internet companies can use BOSS to build and launch web-scale search products that utilize the entire Yahoo! Search index.

In their official page they says:

Yahoo BOSS gives you access to Yahoo!’s investments in crawling and indexing, ranking and relevancy algorithms, and powerful infrastructure. By combining your unique assets and ideas with our search technology assets, BOSS is a platform for the next generation of search innovation, serving hundreds of millions of users across the Web.

Yahoo recently shared a handful of sites that were created using their new technology. From new vertical search engines to a personalized search platform many developers are using BOSS to come up with a range of new products.

123people.com is currently focused entirely on the European market, delivering wide verity of results including images, videos, phone numbers, email addresses, social networking, and Wikipedia articles related to any individual. The portal is using the XML BOSS interface to query Yahoo! Search’s image and web search index in real-time. Based on the geo-targeting of the user and semantic analysis, 123people.com uses their own ranking algorithms to present results tailor-made to people search.

askBOSS was started by one of Yahoo’s very own Saurabh Sahni, who has explored the use of natural language processing in image search a great deal. I personally found the site pretty cool, just check out the screen shoot below:

I even thought of trying the Yahoo Boss service myself to build a unique web application. But before I could get my hands dirty I needed to read more on Yahoo Boss and how the platform works. So Here are some of the resources that I found useful:

Yahoo Boss Tutorial

BOSS Mashup Framework

Yahoo Boss Custom