Yahoo! Reveals Its New Search “BOSS”
San Francisco – Having dropped down so far behind Google Inc. that it became a takeover target, Yahoo Inc., The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Web portal on Wednesday launched a new service called Yahoo! Search BOSS, that lets customers, academics and even rivals create a customized Web search services atop its own technology, which allows small search engines and Web sites to add Yahoo! searches to their query results.
“Yahoo Inc. is relying on the inventiveness of other Web developers to help preserve its independence and regain ground in the lucrative Internet search advertising market.”
This is the embattled Internet Company’s biggest step yet to establish a more distinctive strategy in the Web search market; Yahoo said it will unleash a restricted innovation Thursday with a new service called “Build Your Own Search,” or BOSS, that will share the Sunnyvale-based company’s technology with third parties.
Besides, developers getting unrestricted access to create their own text-link search services, Yahoo is also unlocking its image and news databases to let outsiders create their own permutations of Yahoo News, or Flickr, its photo-sharing site. Yahoo would even supply spell-checking services to partners.
Developing an aggressive search engine would require upwards of $300 million in capital investments, according to Prabhakar Raghavan, chief strategist for Yahoo Search. Besides the hardware involved, there is a limited pool of talent available that can create the query handling, ranking, indexing and crawling infrastructure. Add to that the need for massive amounts of data to achieve relevance, and it becomes nearly impossible for smaller players to compete.
Yahoo is changing all of that with BOSS, Raghavan said.
“This is a bold direction for any search principal to take,” he said. “We are expecting this to disrupt the market, and that includes ourselves.”
With it, developers can construct an independent Web site with a search box, pass users’ queries to BOSS, process the results returned by Yahoo’s search engines in any manner, and display the results.
That said any Web site will be able to set up a search engine using Yahoo’s system for indexing information and images on the Internet. Yahoo expects a lot of Web developers will be interested because it is providing access to a set of tools that would cost more than $300 million to build from scratch.
In essence, BOSS is a proposition to enable others’ search innovation then share profits from the results. It is also the most significant example to date of Yahoo Open Strategy, the company’s effort to expose its own technology for outside developers in an effort to become a more indispensable part of the Internet.
All Yahoo is asking in return is the right to display ads alongside the results of any search engine that piggybacks on its technology. That way, Yahoo figures it will lessen Google’s dominance.
The BOSS API (application programming interface) to Yahoo’s search is free to use, but BOSS partners that succeed will be required to show search ads, said Raghavan.
Yahoo is struggling to stay independent in the face of a challenge by dissident investors seeking to dump its management and board in order to reopen talks with Microsoft Corp. on a merger to form an Internet giant to compete with Google.
The move however, offers details of Yahoo’s own ambition to continue to compete against Google even as it partners with its cross-town rival in a related market.
Last month, Google and Yahoo agreed on a deal in which Yahoo will let Google sell a portion of the Web advertising that runs alongside Yahoo’s own search results.
Analysts were mixed on whether BOSS could give Yahoo! the boost it needs. Gartner analyst Allen Weiner says BOSS has a shot at creating a viable “shadow market” of affiliate Web sites for the company’s ads.
But Vanessa Fox, an editor of Search Engine Land, says most search engines likely view Yahoo! as a competitor and would not want to include Yahoo! search results on their sites. “They will say, ‘We have a unique way to doing search,’” she says.
Despite the consequences, Yahoo! needs to do whatever it can to prove to it can remain an independent company. It has been under siege for most of this year as Microsoft tried to acquire it–but ended up failing–and corporate raider Carl Icahn has waged a proxy fight to unseat Yahoo!’s current board and press the new board to sell the company to Microsoft.
Checkout the BOSS on the net at: http://developer.yahoo.com/boss