Yesterday, Yahoo! made an ambitious attempt and opened up their search service to everyone. Called Yahoo! Search BOSS, this initiative is strategy to attract developers to create their own search service on top of Yahoo’s search technology.
The goal of BOSS is simple: to foster innovation in the search industry. Developers, start-ups, and large Internet companies can use BOSS to build and launch web-scale search products that utilize the entire Yahoo! Search index.
BOSS gives you access to Yahoo!’s investments in crawling and indexing, ranking and relevancy algorithms, and powerful infrastructure.
This is like a turbo-charged Google Custom Search. BOSS will give developers the ability to submit queries/parameters thru a BOSS API to retrieve up to 50 web, image, news, or spelling results in XML or JSON format.
With BOSS, you can basically create your own localized Technorati Search or something similar in a jiffy.
Yahoo has some limited search API before at 5,000 queries per day. BOSS is now unlimited, with no restrictions on presentation and white-labeling (no attribution required). Yahoo is also promising revenue sharing on search monetization in the future. Now, that’s a deal-maker!
i agree, might be useful for web shops/devs. Something worthwhile to a blogger may also be created.