Digital Marketing and Technological Insight

Last night Yahoo announced the launch of another piece in their “open” puzzle by releasing Yahoo Search BOSS. BOSS, which stands for Build your Own Search Service, allows anyone to build and launch a custom search platform that is powered by Yahoo! search’s proprietary technology and infrastructure.

I played around with BOSS today and it is pretty cool, however it really isn’t that innovative considering both Microsoft and Google already offer their own custom search solutions. The difference with BOSS is that Yahoo really does give more control over the key part of any search engine - the rankings and results. Basically, Yahoo allows the user to manipulate the rankings however they see fit, this will really come in handy for more advanced users that are looking for their own unique search engine but do not have the resources to build it themselves.

Here is a list of features that are currently available with BOSS (Yahoo plans on rolling out more features over the next few months).

• Ability to re-rank and blend results.
• Presentation flexibility: no Yahoo display / branding requirements.
• BOSS Mashup Framework: allows developers to mashup search results with other public data sources.
• Access to web, news and image search.
• No rate limits on daily queries.

So why is Yahoo! launching BOSS? Two main reasons: 1) to grow their share of the search market and 2) create new revenue streams. I am not exactly sure how successful they will be with both but here is what Yahoo had to say about it…

“First, we believe that being open is core to Yahoo!’s future success — opening our network, opening our own search experience via SearchMonkey, and now opening our search infrastructure via BOSS — will lead to innovation both on Yahoo! and powered by Yahoo!. For BOSS, we see a virtuous circle in which partners deliver innovative search experiences, and as they grow their audiences and usage we have more data that can be used to improve our own Yahoo! Search experience and as a result, improve the quality of results our BOSS partners and their users get. Second, we do see new revenue streams from BOSS. In the coming months, we’ll be launching a monetization platform for BOSS that will enable Yahoo! to expand its ad network and enable BOSS partners to jointly participate in the compelling economics of search.”

Since I have used Google’s Custom Search Engine on numerous properties for some time now, the question becomes would I switch to BOSS? Not right away, but once Yahoo releases some other features and I see BOSS in action more, it is definitely something I will consider.

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