Openly BOSSing around the Internet
It's too soon to know what will remain standing as new CEO Carol Bartz makes her way through the the halls of Yahoo, but here's a modest proposal from one admirer: Show some love to the BOSS.
I don't mean Bartz, yahoos (though could it hurt if you're employed there?). I mean Yahoo Search BOSS (Build your Own Search Service), the company's open search Web services platform. Amidst the thicket of advertising-based this and widgetastic that, here's a Yahoo project that thrives on mashing up searches. Remember search? Yahoo used to do search...
BOSS makes Yahoo's search infrastructure -- its massive index and the technology that whips it into shape -- available to more or less anyone who wants to build something with it. The API is REST-based (representational state transfer) and delivers results in either JSON or XML, after which the builder's free to do as they will with them, with no branding requirement from Yahoo.
If BOSS doesn't ring a bell with you, that may be because it's still fairly new. The API was launched in early July of last year and was presented as another extension of the Yahoo Open Strategy, the "big-bet" change in philosophy that also informs such initiatives as Search Monkey, OAuth support, and the new feature integrations on personal start pages.
Oh yeah -- didn't that one guy bring that stuff to the table? Indeed, the Open Strategy movement was one of the "rewiring the entire network" efforts which Jerry Yang strongly advocated during his tenure. BOSS itself rewired Yahoo's Search API, or its appeal to developers, by offering unlimited queries each day (as opposed to 5,000 for the older API), lifting restrictions on how results and attributions were presented, and permitting the blending of Yahoo search results and proprietary content.
Since July, the variety of sites that have taken up with the BOSS is pretty impressive. OneRiot launched in July along with BOSS (as Me.dium) and has gotten strong enough response to its offering to refine itself into a social-networking site with a fun "hot topics" feature. (Did you know that one of the day's topics out in MyTwitFace Land is "the grossness of cheese?" Now you do. Happy to help.) Delver also sifts the social networks, building out from the searcher's own list of friends on the various services.
The list goes on (and beyond the social networks, though grown-up search capabilities certainly are welcome on those sites). Aliixer focuses its results for high-school and college students. Coloralo specializes in delivering pages from coloring books. Bossyhorns is an ultra-simple site optimized for iPhone. Oregonians wanting to buy locally can fire up Green Fabric, a project that ought to inspire any number of locally focused blogs around the country. And V3GGIE feeds the non-carnivorous and guides them to each other's plant-terrorizing blogs.
Just shy of six months post-launch, the BOSS team blogged that the API is serving over 100 queries every second, or over 10 million every day. (Some numeric perspective from their blog: "As a point of reference, the total queries from developer-built, BOSS-powered search engines would rank ahead of the combined searches done on both Facebook and Amazon, and just behind Ask.com.")
This week, though, a new BOSS project came to light, one that combines not only Yahoo news-search results but Twitter feeds and -- oh, boy -- Google App Engine. TweetNews reorganizes Yahoo's news feed to present results in the order that Twitter excitement would indicate they'd be in if an interested human was arranging them on the page (rather than a time stamp). The app was developed by Yahoo engineer Vik Singh. Twitter? Google?!
The good news is that early word from inside Yahoo says that Bartz feels positive about Yahoo's search business. Her feelings on open services? Not yet known. And, ironically, the top story on TweetNews as I wrap up this story is a report that Steve Ballmer and Yahoo chair Roy Bostock met this week...as did Ballmer and Bartz herself. It's hard to conceive of a project like BOSS surviving -- culturally, anyway -- in the future such meetings suggests. But in the name of clever, useful search mashups, one hopes attention can be paid to a plucky, forward-thinking BOSS.