UX

Yahoo! has launched BOSS, (Build your Own Search Service), an open-source version of their search engine technology.  BOSS offers developers all the power with none of the trademarked hassles of traditionally outsourced search engine technology.  Developers are able to tweak the code, create mashups and generate eye-catching, relevant results.  Could Yahoo!’s approach to the search engine battle be the move that evens the playing field?
 
As Yahoo! BOSS website explains, “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.”  While most traditional search engine sites return thousands upon thousands of results, the average viewer usually stops looking after three or four pages of returns.  Yahoo! BOSS allows developers to scale back the returns and adjust the ranking and sorting structure to more specifically fit the needs of the web page the customized search engine sits on.
 
So far, the results are amazing.  Initial launch partners, Hakia and Me.dium have already created site specific search models for their companies.  Hakia is taking a semantic view of tuning up search engine results to bring back what it emphasizes as “quality results.”  Hakia’s website explains a “quality result satisfies three criteria simultaneously: It (1) comes from credible sources (verticals) recommended by librarians, (2) is the most recent information available, and (3) is absolutely relevant to the query.” 

Me.dium offers a social search engine tool that bases its returns off what pages are getting the most hits by real people, or CrowdRank.  “We calculate CrowdRank by combining the recent activity a page has received, how connected that URL is to other related URLs (as measured by the activity of the crowds), and any change in recent activity that the URL might be experiencing (which we call Velocity),” says Me.dium’s FAQ sheet.
 
Yahoo! BOSS promises two things: openness and customization.  According to a TechCrunch write up, Yahoo! BOSS is so open it will even work with competitor Google App Engine.  Demonstrating the ease and elegance of Yahoo! BOSS, lead engineer Vik Singh created a mashup that combines the two products into a functioning app using only 50 lines of code.  That’s great, but what about the average Joe programmer?  Well, according to www.javarants.com site owner Sam Pullara, the new Yahoo! BOSS API is so tight, you can craft something like www.4hoursearch.com  “It took 4 hours to write the initial code, 4 hours for it to go from unknown to 20 hits / second, 4 hours looking for a domain name and 4 hours to build the brand new UI.  Fortunately, it won’t take 4 hours to find something with it  ,” Pullara posts.  It would appear Yahoo! BOSS delivers on both fronts.
 
Often times, the best way to beat a larger, stronger opponent is by using their own strength against them.  Google’s share of the search engine market is significantly bigger than Yahoo!’s.  But if Yahoo! can enable an entire world of developers to create their own style of search engine by opening up their code, Google will have more to worry about.  Once a solid monetization strategy is announced, the threat to Google will become more tangible.  Investor’s would be wise to keep an eye on search engine usage statistics in the upcoming quarters.  Any slip in Google’s numbers will indicate that the Yahoo! BOSS students of today may become the search engine masters of tomorrow.

By Alicen Hogan