BOSS Hacks – an unofficial Yahoo! BOSS blog

Open Hack Day started in the Bay Area several years ago. The concept has legs and it has traveled around the world. Bangalore is the “Silicon Valley” of India and the home of Yahoo! India. They held the first Open Hack Day India in 2007. Hackers returned for Open Hack 2009 and several winning hacks pushed the BOSS envelope. Here are the winning hacks:

• Best Search Inside – Y! Grep – (by pi: Ravi Bhushan Kumar & Ravi S. Math)

  Problem:
  We have all experienced that after getting search hits to sites like youtube.com and Amazon.com from the search engine’s index, we end up searching the “term” again within the site to find more relevant results.

  We have tried to optimize the above work flow.
  The hack intends to provide a unified view of relevant search results powered by yahoo search index and links to “y!Grep” site’s native search results. We provide cool sneak peeks into the “yGrep!” site’s native results.

• Best Gone in 90 seconds – BOSS in 90 seconds (by The Flex Ninjas: Raghunath Rao Thricovil & Harish Sivaramakrishnan)

  This hack pushed the concept of 90 second demo to actually creating an entire hack in 90 seconds, live on stage. It’s an enhanced image search engine based on Flex, Clrful, and geocoding.

• Best Built from Scratch – Search Engine with Hybrid (Human & Artificial) Intelligence (by API (Advancing Predictive Intelligence): Antano Solar John & Niranjan Prithviraj)

  Description:
  The intelligence of the engine is based on a hybrid Machine/Human analysis. It uses both language Onthology and tags by people to understand what one is really wanting to find!

  Its coded in Perl making use NLP Modules including Wordnet and Lingua. It also uses YQL and Yahoo Pipes in a nested mechanism.