Yahoo Search BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) was a Yahoo! Developer Network initiative to provide an open search web services platform.Yahoo Search BOSS YDN Page
/ref> Yahoo discontinued BOSS JSON Search API, BOSS Placefinder API, BOSS Placespotter API and as well BOSS Hosted Search, on March 31, 2016. Yahoo BOSS is succeeded by Yahoo Partner Ads (YPA).

History

Yahoo launched BOSS in July 2008. In 2012, Yahoo expanded their Yahoo Search BOSS platform to provide additional services such as BOSS Hosted Search to enable any website owner to embed Yahoo web search experience free on their site.Yahoo Search BOSS Portal
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BOSS API

The main goal and idea of BOSS was to give users, in its case developers, access to the

Yahoo Search Yahoo! Search is a search engine owned and operated by Yahoo!, using Microsoft Bing to power results. Originally, "Yahoo! Search" referred to a Yahoo!-provided interface that sent Web search query, queries to a searchable index of pages supple ...

index Index (: indexes or indices) may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Fictional entities * Index (''A Certain Magical Index''), a character in the light novel series ''A Certain Magical Index'' * The Index, an item on the Halo Array in the ...

for a small fee. The results could be supplied into the developer's website or program so that they could manipulate the resources according to their product's requirements. BOSS allowed the results to be returned in

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...

JSON JSON (JavaScript Object Notation, pronounced or ) is an open standard file format and electronic data interchange, data interchange format that uses Human-readable medium and data, human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consi ...

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

, or

text Text may refer to: Written word * Text (literary theory) In literary theory, a text is any object that can be "read", whether this object is a work of literature, a street sign, an arrangement of buildings on a city block, or styles of clothi ...

and allowed use of comprehensive search features available in Yahoo, like pulling the results by page, searching inside

PDF Portable document format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe Inc., Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, computer hardware, ...

s, etc. The ranking of the websites for a search term was the same as the

ranking since both of these were pulling from the same index and ranking. One of BOSS's key differentiators was the free use of BOSS as a white label, no ads required service. By using Yahoo's search engine, which has had millions in R&D invested in it in the years since Yahoo boomed in the 1990s, web developers were able to get much higher quality results than if they built their own search engine. On August 17, 2010, Yahoo stated that BOSS would require some sort of ad or fee-based model to sustain itself.

BOSS Hosted Search

BOSS Hosted Search was a completely self serve product that enabled any web site owner to embed Yahoo web search experience on their site for free. The search experience was hosted by Yahoo and provided in an iframe which could be embedded on any web site. The search experience was very similar to that of search.yahoo.com. The product was provided free and web site owners got a percentage of the ad revenue share if any user clicked on a search ad within the frame. Web site owners could also customize the iframe by adding their own partner logo next to the search box, removing left rail, or removing the Yahoo search box altogether (and using their own). For implementing BOSS Hosted Search iframe, web site owners needed to simply sign up at Yahoo Search BOSS Portal and copy/paste a Javascript code snippet on their site. Yahoo also launched reporting module to provide web site owners with more insights on how many searches were conducted through BOSS Hosted Search and the revenue which they have generated.

Usage

According to a Yahoo press meeting in 2009, there were 30 million queries a day being run through BOSS powered web search pages.

References

External links