New York — When Yahoo launched BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) last year, the company mentioned that it expect to generate money from the service. On Wednesday, Yahoo has announced several new developer innovations to its Yahoo Search BOSS API, allowing increased access to structured data and longer abstracts, and is also imposing fees for using (BOSS) in order to support its plan to offer developers service-level agreements (SLAs) and increased daily query limits.
Developers will be able to utilize the BOSS API to access SearchMonkey, which can make search results more useful and attractive using structured data, Yahoo said Wednesday.
Yahoo will impose a fee for the use of BOSS API (application programming interface), the service by which other Web sites can extract Yahoo’s search data then redesign it to their hearts’ content, according to a blog post by Ashim Chhabra of Yahoo’s Search BOSS team. Previously, the company had hoped to generate money from BOSS by requiring outsiders with high-traffic sites to show Yahoo search ads next to their results.
“We are exposing the structured data in SearchMonkey to all BOSS developers,” said Bill Michels, senior director of Yahoo’s Open Search Platform.
The new approach would enable organizations to follow up on their own monetization strategies and will help make the API itself more useful by lifting constraints, Chhabra said.
Once Yahoo introduces BOSS fees towards mid-2009, it will also increase the number of search results an engine can obtain via a single API call to 1,000 from 50. The fees vary depending on the type and quantity of search result involved. Yahoo will also offer SLAs to promote the creation of more sophisticated BOSS search engines.
Two additional BOSS features include Long Abstracts — which introduces a lengthier character limit for abstracts, providing more URL-level information – and Site Explorer, which allows access to domain and sub-domain inbound links and page links, so Web masters can see how Yahoo is indexing their sites.
“It would allow you to do interesting things with relevancy,” said Michaels.
“The theme with our road map is to give developers access to as much tools and data as possible,” Michaels added. “We want that functionality and tools to be available to everybody.”
“We are introducing fees for a couple of reasons. First and most importantly, we are hard at work on a number of technologies that will enhance both the functionality and performance of BOSS, and usage fees will help support this development,” Chhabra said. “Second, we believe that introducing the proposed pricing structure will improve the ecosystem by optimizing capacity for our serious developers.”
Still, it is hard to guess what effect these and other initiatives will have on the adoption of BOSS and Yahoo’s revenue stream, but they seemed to have taken steps in the right direction.