BOSS Hacks - an unofficial Yahoo! BOSS blog » BOSS

Watch that Request Length

Ted — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 00:37:12 +0000

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.

Yahoo BOSS to Push Around Bing (arnoldit.com)
OneRiot Confirms They’re Building Yahoo’s Real Time Search Engine (techcrunch.com)
Yahoo BOSS Might Be Bigger Than Bing (techcrunch.com)
Accessing SearchMonkey Structured Objects via BOSS (ysearchblog.com)

Dynamic “sites” Creation for Vertical Search

Ted — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 08:56:35 +0000

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.

Yahoo adds Delicious data to search partnership (news.cnet.com)
Yahoo BOSS Adds Support for Delicious (programmableweb.com)
Yahoo to Enable Custom Semantic Search Engines (readwriteweb.com)
Yahoo! BOSS and trainspotting (slideshare.net)
SearchMonkey and BOSS Take on ETech (ysearchblog.com)

Vertical Search Exploration with SkillsMatter in London

Ted — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 07:22:28 +0000

Yahoo! BOSS and trainspotting

View more OpenOffice presentations from 7mary4.

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.

Accentuate your results with Netflix

Ted — Tue, 05 May 2009 19:10:57 +0000

Netflix, the DVD rental company has announced a new series of APIs that open their catalog to developers. Visit the Netflix Developer Section for more information.

This could be used to augment BOSS search results for sites that explore movies, travel, popular culture, and more. It’s worth noting Netflix’s history of innovative user interfaces and two amazingly talented people they grabbed from Yahoo!: Bill Scott and Kent Brewster. These two will keep the Netflix APIs and hackability interesting.

Kent Brewster gives you more information in his blog post Netflix Catalog API Explorer.

Build a semantic Search Engine with BOSS

Ted — Sun, 03 May 2009 17:56:34 +0000

What’s the quickest way to build a semantic search engine? Use BOSS and and the Yahoo! Searchmonkey query filter. You’ll be surprised how much information is available to begin working with.

The Search Monkey Query Filter

This pattern works in the basic Yahoo! search box: searchmonkeyid:com.yahoo.page.uf.{microformat}. It tells Yahoo! Search to only return web pages that include a certain microformat. We can also use this in our BOSS API requests. Here’s a list of structured data surfaced in BOSS via SearchMonkey:

hAtom -
Represents a subset of the Atom syndication format

hCalendar -
Represents calendar dates and events, using a representation of
the iCalendar
standard

hCard -
Represents people, companies, organizations, and places, using a
representation of the vCard standard

hReview -
Represents reviews of products, services, businesses, and
events

XFN – Represents
human relationships using hyperlinks

Geo -
Represents geograhic coordinates

rel-tag – Marks
up the destination of a hyperlink as an author-designated
tag

adr -
Represents address information

Dublin
Core
- Allows developers to specify document metadata

FOAF
- Friend of a Friend specifies personal profiles and social
networks

SIOC
- Specifies elements in blogs, forums and Q&A sites

Other
supported vocabularies – See the SearchMonkey
documentation for a list of other supported vocabularies

Universal BOSS API Query Operators: Apply to Web, Images and News

SearchMonkey in Your BOSS

Now we have the ability to limit our search results to sites that use a particular microformat. We can now ask for this structured data to build our robust search engine We’ll use the SearchMonkey view attributes. There are two variations that define the format of the data.

view=searchmonkey_feed (dataRSS format)
view=searchmonkey_rdf (rdf format)

The following example shows how each look.

Let’s build a semantic music search engine. We’ll start by filtering for hreview microformats to get music reviews about CocoRosie: http://boss.yahooapis.com/ysearch/web/v1/cocorosie+searchmonkeyid:com.yahoo.page.uf.hreview?appid=Your_App_Id&format=xml&start=0&count=15&view=keyterms%2Csearchmonkey_feed%2Csearchmonkey_rdf.

We can use the following sample result to begin inserting reviews as well as other structured data. You’ve got the basic foundation for building an application that presents data-rich information to your users. Explore your favorite rdf and micformat queries to come up with new ideas.

Please leave a comment if you are already using this technique in your site or have similar ideas to share with others.

Sample Result




CocoRosie... love song tekno cocorosie.
Other Info. Lifetime rating of 4.83 ...]]>

http://lrd.yahooapis.com/.../**http%3A//www.blogskins.com/info/150260
2009/04/22
blogskins.com/info/150260]]>


	skin
	Tekno
	Love Song
	download
	BlogSkins
	Skin Info
	fade
	Skin type
	bg
	follow this link
	cocorosie
	Blogger
	tear
	keep well
	Lifetime
	logged-in
	BM
	Random Skin
	Myles
	hmm




	
		
		
			screaming!tragic
			
		
		
		
		
			animate_
			
		
		
		
		
			madeline_tn
			
		
		
	
	
		
		
			Tekno Love Song
			either continue th patern or don't fade the
			background, and all will look better. but it's still lovely!
			20080421
			
			
			screaming!tragic
			
			
			
			
		
		
		
		
			Tekno Love Song
			you need stars! I think the bg shouldn't fade off.
			Other than that, it's fabulous
			20070903
			
			
				animate_
				
			
			
			
		
		
		
		
			Tekno Love Song
			hmm.. the bg shouldn't be white. should continue
			the pattern thingy... plus, the picture somehow doesn't appeal to me..
			20070713
			
				
					madeline_tn
					
				
			
			
		
		
	
	
		love
		song
		tekno
		cocorosie
		
			
				love
			
		
		
			
				song
			
		
		
			
				tekno
			
		
		
			
				cocorosie
			
		
	




	
		
	
	
		
	
	
		
	
	
		screaming!tragic
	
	
		
	
	
		
	
	
		
	
	
		
	
	
		animate_
	
	
		
	
	
		
	
	
		
	
	
		
	
	
		madeline_tn
	
	
		
	
	
		
	
	
		
	
	
		
	
	
		Tekno Love Song
	
	
		either continue th patern or
		don't fade the background, and all will look better. but it's still lovely!
		
	
	
		20080421
	
	
		
	
	
		
	
	
		screaming!tragic
	
	
		
	
	
		
	
	
		
	
	
		
	
	
		
	
	
		Tekno Love Song
	
	
		you need stars! I think
		the bg shouldn't fade off. Other than that, it's fabulous
	
	
		20070903
	
	
		
	
	
		
	
	
		animate_
	
	
		
	
	
		
	
	
		
	
	
		
	
	
		
	
	
		Tekno Love Song
	
	
	hmm.. the bg shouldn't
	be white. should continue the pattern thingy... plus, the picture somehow
	doesn't appeal to me..
	
	
		20070713
	
	
		
	
	
		
	
	
		madeline_tn
	
	
		
	
	
		
	
	
		
	
	
		
	
	
		love
	
	
		
	
	
		
	
	
		song
	
	
		
	
	
		
	
	
		tekno
	
	
		
	
	
		
	
	
		cocorosie
	


18514
BlogSkins.com Skin Info - Tekno Love Song
http://www.blogskins.com/info/150260

Build Your Own Search Engine presentation in London

Ted — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 10:15:38 +0000

Find out how to use BOSS to build a search engine at the upcoming “YDN Tuesday: Build Your Own Search Service” presentation in London. The presentation will be on Tuesday June 2, 2009 at 6:30pm at the Skills Matter office in London. Sign up today at the Skills Matter web site.

This is a brief introduction:

Yahoo! BOSS, Build your Own Search Service, is an API that gives developers access to Yahoo’s search index. Unlike similar search API’s, BOSS gives you much more control over how you use the data. You can mash it with other sources, re-order the ranking, change the appearance, or do whatever it takes to make your site special.

Find out how to use BOSS to build sites, tools, and modules.
This presentation will cover the web service, data options, and show examples of how BOSS is used by various sites and tools.
Skills Matter -
Yahoo! Developer Network : Yahoo! BOSS, Build your Own Search Service

This is part of a monthly series of free lectures hosted by Yahoo! Developer Network and Skills Matter.

BOSS Hacks - an unofficial Yahoo! BOSS blog » BOSS

Watch that Request Length

Dynamic “sites” Creation for Vertical Search

Vertical Search Exploration with SkillsMatter in London

Accentuate your results with Netflix

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Build a semantic Search Engine with BOSS

The Search Monkey Query Filter

SearchMonkey in Your BOSS

Sample Result

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Build Your Own Search Engine presentation in London

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