You can leave your questions for the BOSS team on this BOSS thread: Announcement: “Microsoft, Yahoo! Change Search Landscape”.

This will help keep track of concerns and prepare the answers for you.

How does it work?

Here’s some info from Instant Color Schemes:

We take 5 related images from Yahoo Image Search and then show the most prominent 6 colors from each image. Each column of colors is taken from a single image.
Instant Color Schemes

This is a fun example of using BOSS for more than a standard search application. You can easily take this idea and develop a module for blogs or other sites.

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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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PopGist improves the relevancy of the existing search engines and provides better user search experience. The prototype in popgist.com demonstrates the power of PopGist technology by utilizing the search feed provided by Yahoo BOSS. Comparing with the original Yahoo search results, the overlap in the top ten results between Google and Yahoo significantly increases by using PopGist search ranking algorithm for most of the queries tested.
PopGist improves the relevancy of major search engines – AltSearchEngines

PopGist uses BOSS, but reranks the results and adds threads of discussions to give you a more rounded result page.

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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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Netflix

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.

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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.

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