Boss: Build Your Own Search Service with Yahoo Technology

Yahoo announced BOSS today, a service that allows developers to build their own search service using Yahoo search technology. Boss stands for “Build your Own Search Service”, the goal of the Boss is to faster innovation in search industry, Yahoo says.

With the BOSS service aby one can build a search service using Yahoo search index, it allows developers to submit queries via an open API and get the results via XML and JSON. The service can be used to get results for Web search, news, image search and for spelling suggestions. The good news is that there is no daily limit for the queries and you don’t have to worry about Yahoo branding. Boss results can be mashed together with other data sources.

That is not all but Yahoo will introduce a monetization platform for the partners with some requirements and a payment model probably to split the revenues. This is definetely a move to woo developer community to build verticals on Yahoo search that in turn may benefit Yahoo in the long run.

Google also offers a custom search engine service that allows any one to build a custom search service.

Boss, Documentation