BOSS’s integration with SearchMonkey provides great structural data. However, it’s a bit tricky to get results filled with the appropriate data. This blog post from the search team introduces the new SearchMonkey query filters: Accessing SearchMonkey Structured Objects via BOSS.
The SearchMonkey team has been encouraging developers to use our structured data to build semantic Web applications ever since we partnered with BOSS. Using the BOSS API, you can access SearchMonkey structured objects.
To restrict the result set to pages with SearchMonkey objects, just add “searchmonkey:<objecttype>” to your query. The result set from BOSS will only contain URLs that have objects of that type.
Accessing SearchMonkey Structured Objects via BOSS
Here’s a list of SearchMonkey filters:
- searchmonkey:video – restricts the result set to videos.
- searchmonkey:product – restricts the result set to products.
- searchmonkey:local – restricts the result set to local businesses.
- searchmonkey:event – restricts the result set to events.
- searchmonkey:document – restricts the result set to presentations, spreadsheets, and similar document formats.
- searchmonkey:discussion – restricts the result set to blogs and forums.
- searchmonkey:game – restricts the result set to Flash games.
Here’s a sample search request for iPhone products:
http://boss.yahooapis.com/ysearch/web/v1/iphone+searchmonkey:product?appid=insert-your-appid&format=xml&start=0&count=15&view=keyterms,searchmonkey_rdf
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Yahoo! BOSS’s sites param gives us great flexibility in creating vertical search engines. However, we are limited by the number of characters. Here are some tips in keeping the length as short as possible.
- Forget passing subdirectories: foo.com/bar is considered the same as foo.com. BOSS will differentiate between subdomains bar.foo.com is not the same as foo.com. In a real-world example passing finance.yahoo.com/news will be interpreted as finance.yahoo.com. But finance.yahoo.com will give a different result than sports.yahoo.com.
- Remove www from the url. This is just wasting space. There may be an exception when the site was not setup to work without the www subdomain. I doubt this would make an impact.
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I recently did a presentation in London with Skills Matter about Yahoo! BOSS. The small group was filled with ideas about extending BOSS functionality. I wrote a new post for the Yahoo Developer Network that expands on some of these concepts: Make BOSS More Dynamic.
The post discusses the idea of generating the “sites” argument, which tells BOSS to limit the results to a specified list of web sites, dynamically for each query. This allows each query to determine what sites are experts and then create a result set based on those experts.
I have built a prototype and will release it this week after I have a time to clean up some of the loose ends.
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I gave a presentation last night with Skills Matter in London. This presentation goes beyond the basic statistics of BOSS and shows how a fictional Trainspotter uses BOSS to build his ultimate trainspotting enthusiast web site.
Skills Matter is a great organization that provides daily classes about open source and agile work techniques. They also provide courses around Europe in various programming languages and techniques. Check out Skills Matter’s schedules to see if an event is coming to your area.
I will be following up with another post about some of the conversations from this event.
You’ll see example BOSS requests at the end of the slideshow. Simply replace the fictional tomstrains.com urls and your application id to see the resulting xml.
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I gave a presentation at the recent www2009 conference in Madrid about the Future of Vertical Search Engines. It was a great event and I enjoyed watching researchers and developers from across the world informally discuss ideas and collaborations.
The Yahoo! Developer Network just published my blog post: The Future of Vertical Search Engines. The blog post includes much more information that is hard to describe in a simple set of PowerPoint slides.
I hope you find the information helpful. Join the conversation on the YDN blog.
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