San Francisco — Yahoo nowadays is paying some sincere attention to its Yahoo Search BOSS suite of development tools with a new variety of data available through its service, on Thursday said that it would be extending the Boss program to include new sources and better organizational capabilities, and has added Delicious to the mix, empowering those using the search results for storing and sharing Web address bookmarks.
Developers who wish to develop their own search services should now be able to play with three latest tools related to personalized Delicious content, language filters, and news stories’ dates.
Yahoo Search BOSS is essentially an open source search platform which can be utilized by developers, start-ups and large companies to mix and mash Yahoo Search into their own custom offering, to foster innovation in the search industry.
Ashim Chhabra, a member of the Yahoo Search Boss Team, explained on the Yahoo Search Blog, “The Delicious data available today through BOSS includes Delicious saves, top tags, and count information.” Working in all of this seems like a smart move, since Delicious is one of Yahoo’s more popular properties.
So basically, BOSS allows others to incorporate Yahoo search results onto their own sites, processing them and blending them with other data if desired and sharing resulting revenue with Yahoo from larger-scale partnerships. When BOSS is pinged for a search query, the results can display the number of times a particular Web site has been bookmarked at Delicious, what tags people labeled it with, and how often those tags were applied.
Initially introduced last July, the Boss tool allows web developers to access Yahoo search API and create custom search services for their sites. By the end of the year, the company reckoned that boss was powering some 10 million queries per day.
As for the other stuff, BOSS now supports Chinese, Czech, and Hungarian, and according to Chhabra’s blog post, “BOSS is now equipped with Advanced Language functionality so that you can filter specific language results for a given market.” Which makes the platform more accessible to developers who serve foreign regions.
“Finally,” the official post stated, “BOSS News Service can now sort by a date or a specified time range of days, weeks, or hours.”
Other changes to Yahoo BOSS which were announced lately include:
Advanced Language functionality so that you can filter specific language results for a given market. BOSS now supports Czech, Hungarian, and traditional Chinese. Language information about Web and news search results is also available by adding view=language in the BOSS call.
The company, which hopes that the expansion of BOSS will help the service continue to grow and give developers new options for how the service can be used and to help it reclaim search market share lost to Google, while announcing the new BOSS features on its search blog Thursday.
BOSS also got new sorting abilities for situations when developers need to organize search results by date.
All of this might not quite add up to irresistibility, but developers should be hard-pressed to complain, and Chhabra promised that more BOSS updates are on the way.