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Tag: yahoo search boss

  • Yahoo Search Boss Is About To Go Away

    Yahoo Search Boss Is About To Go Away

    Yahoo announced that it is shutting down Search Boss, the set of tools it has offered since 2009 to help developers and others build their own search engines.

    In 2010, following the Microsoft/Yahoo search and advertising partnership announcement, Yahoo addressed the future of the service indicating it would keep it around utilizing algorithmic search results by Microsoft.

    Now, six years later, Yahoo is pulling the plug. On the Search Boss website (via Search Engine Land):

    At Yahoo, we’re always looking for ways to streamline and simplify products for our customers. With this focus in mind, we will discontinue BOSS JSON Search API, BOSS Placefinder API, BOSS Placespotter API and as well BOSS Hosted Search, on March 31, 2016.

    Access to the BOSS will continue until March 31, 2016. Moving forward, customers can instead use YPA, a Javascript Solution that provides algorithmic web results with search ads for publishers who manage their own search engine results pages (SERPs). Click here to apply or learn more about YPA, or if you are working with a Yahoo Partner Manager, they can help you explore your options.

    If you’re concerned about the closure of Search Boss (frankly, I haven’t heard anybody talk about it in quite some time), you can check out an FAQ page here.

    Image via Marissa Mayer (Twitter)

  • The New Yahoo Search BOSS

    Yahoo just announced that there is a new home for Search BOSS at boss.yahoo.com. Along with that, there are three new BOSS offerings aimed at addressing user engagement, traffic recirculation, monetization, and high development/maintenance costs.

    After the Microsoft Yahoo search alliance was announced, a lot of people wondered what would happen to Yahoo’s Searchmonkey and BOSS. Searchmonkey went away, and earlier this year, Yahoo launched BOSS version 2.

    Now, it’s time for a new phase of BOSS. The aforementioned offerings are BOSS Hosted Search, BOSS Site Search and BOSS Shortcuts. The first two are available globally today (site search via private alpha), and the third is available through Yahoo’s private Alpha program for the US, Canada, India, and UK markets.

    “In minutes, you can configure a web search experience much like the Yahoo! Search page with structured content, search refiners, image modules and other rich assets,” the BOSS team says of Hosted Search. “Simply pick the bells and whistles that meet the look and feel you desire, insert the generated code snippet into your page and you are done. It is Search built your way and offers opportunity to apply for revenue sharing through search advertising.”

    “The concept of Site Search has been around for many years, but the products available in the marketplace leave a lot to be desired,” the team says. “Publishers deserve a solution that is more focused on the content of their site, that delivers results that are highly relevant and fresh, that offers rich customizations, and that can be deployed with ease.”

    “Search is more than just the perfect display of meaningful results based on user keywords,” they say of Shortcuts. “It’s also about recommending related content based on the context of what a user is reading on a publisher site. Existing solutions are often over-commercialized, deliver poor results and drive users away.”

    “BOSS Shortcuts delivers technology that understands the content to help analyze your article pages and find terms that engage with your audience,” they explain. “When users click on these terms a contextual window is presented filled with highly relevant results from your site, the web, and our ad marketplace.”

    Along with the three new offerings, Yahoo also unveiled some updates to the Search BOSS API. This includes making ads simpler and faster and adding 10 new markets. The full list is here.

  • Yahoo Search BOSS Documentation Released to Developers

    Last month, Yahoo announced pricing info and search advertising/branding policies for the upcoming version of Yahoo Search BOSS, which is expected to be released this summer. Now, the company has released the technical documentation for developers. 

    The documentation includes info on using OAuth with the new API, Syntax specs on querying the API and the format of the returned results, and for calling ads from the platform, as well as the markets that are supported by the product. 

    Markets include 40 countries in various native languages. The full list can be found in this section of the documentation. Here’s what the pricing chart looks like:

    "BOSS has always been and will be about developers," wrote the BOSS team’s Rahul Hampole. "Our goal is to provide a product that allows you to build sustainable businesses via interesting cloud based search technology at a fair cost. In addition, we encourage BOSS developers to monetize your products using Yahoo! Search advertising – this will enable a long-term, symbiotic relationship between developers, consumers and Yahoo! Our pricing scheme is designed to reflect our belief in this ecosystem."

    When Yahoo switched to Bing as a back-end search results provider, a lot of questions were up in the air with regards to BOSS, as well as Yahoo’s other developer search tool, SearchMonkey. Ultimately, Yahoo decided to ditch SearchMonkey and Keep BOSS.

    There is of course a fair amount of conversation about the BOSS documentation in the Yahoo Search BOSS Yahoo Group. 

  • More Yahoo Search BOSS Details Released

    More Yahoo Search BOSS Details Released

    Sometime this summer, the latest version of Yahoo Search BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) will launch, and on March 1st, Yahoo intends to provide lots more technical details.  But this morning, Yahoo shared what many developers really need to know: pricing info, along with its search advertising and branding policies.

    We’ll go ahead and paste Yahoo’s full table of pricing info below so that you can have a look at it.  It’ll be pretty key in determining how everyone reacts to whatever else Yahoo has planned, after all.

    Here are the rest of the details the company released.  A post on the Yahoo Search Blog stated, "We encourage BOSS developers to use Yahoo! Search advertising to build a sustainable business for their applications, and those qualifying for Yahoo! Search advertising will be served ads in their BOSS API calls.  Through the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance, we believe we have a robust marketplace and search advertising platform that will meet customers’ needs.  In addition, we encourage developers to experiment with other advertising formats such as display."

    Yahoo’s hoping all that will impress developers.  If that’s the case, its branding policy will then kick in and let the company put its name in front of more end users.

    The blog post indicated, "With the new version, we will be publishing Yahoo! branding guidelines for BOSS and will require all applications to include recognition of the Yahoo! brand.  We want you to be able to leverage the Yahoo! brand to help signify the valuable platform on which your applications are built."

    That could pay off in terms of free advertising.

  • Yahoo (Somewhat) Addresses Future of BOSS

    Yahoo (Somewhat) Addresses Future of BOSS

    Back when the Microsoft and Yahoo search and advertising deal was announced, people (particularly developers) were left wondering what would become of such Yahoo projects as Searchmonkey and BOSS. These things let developers build upon Yahoo’s search technology.

    Microsoft did imply it would be open to keeping them around, but not much has been revealed about the plans. While this isn’t exactly clarity, Yahoo has addressed the future of BOSS to a mild extent. In a post on Yahoo Groups, Ashim Chhabra of the Yahoo Search BOSS Team writes:

    Under this agreement, Yahoo! is permitted to continue offering the BOSS web service, with search results that would integrate Yahoo! services and content with algorithmic results provided by Microsoft. As always, our intention is to provide a BOSS offering as long as it makes business and economic sense to do so. We are still examining what the BOSS offering will consist of, with some services powered by Microsoft, unique content that Yahoo! currently provides, and the potential for additional Yahoo! content in the future.

    Prior to the announcement of the Yahoo!-Microsoft search agreement, we’d already shared our intention to explore a fee-based structure for BOSS. We continue to explore an appropriate fee structure or other revenue model as we work through the future of BOSS.

    Yahoo Search BOSS

    Yahoo has said that it will uphold the front-end part of its search engine, but the back-end would generally be handled by Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Last year, Microsoft acknowledged that it liked what Yahoo was doing with Searchmonkey and BOSS, so it is quite possible these things will remain.

    The Microsoft Yahoo deal is not necessarily going to be a permanent relationship anyway. That is if it even gets approved. The deal still faces regulatory approval.


    Related Articles:

    > What Happens to Yahoo’s Search-Related Developer Projects?

    > Three New Yahoo Search BOSS Tools Introduced

    > Yahoo Upgrades BOSS, Asks For Pennies In Return