If like me you’ve been tinkering with the idea of building your own search engine (sounds absurd doesn’t it), then Yahoo may have come to your rescue.

They’ve now released what they call Yahoo BOSS (Build Your Own Search Engine).

How is BOSS different from the other Search Engine API’s ?

For those of us who have struggled to fathom out how to use Google’s gData API, then that’s probably our first question.

According to the Yahoo BOSS FAQ page

For the first time developers can tap into our search infrastructure and build applications for commercial use without restrictions around presentation or ordering of results.
You can take BOSS results, blend in your own secret sauce, and build a search engine of your own design, all without required brand attribution.

Here’s an overview from the Yahoo BOSS page

	Previously Available with Yahoo! Search API	Available with BOSS
Queries Per Day	5,000	Unlimited*
No Restrictions on Presentation
Re-Ordering Allowed
Blending of Proprietary and Yahoo! Search Content Allowed
Monetization		Coming Soon!
White-Label	Attribution Required

* BOSS offers developers unlimited daily queries, though Yahoo! reserves the right to limit unintended usage, such as automated querying by bots.

What search content can you find through BOSS ?

With this first release of BOSS you can fetch search content for Web, News and Images, and it includes Spelling Suggestions.

What about Future Plans ?

They want BOSS to grow and evolve with a focus on providing additional functionality and tools.

The Downside ?

I’m not sure if it is a downside but they say that eventually

it will be a requirement to publish Yahoo! Sponsored Search ads as part of search applications that exceed a set QPD (Queries Per Day) level

To me that says, sometime in the future, if you want to get Unlimited Queries Per Day, you will need to host Yahoo’s ads on your site.

However they will be sharing the revenue with you.

They also mention that in the future they may also offer you as an alternative, a payment model option, if your number of queries goes above a specified threshold.

At present you can use Yahoo BOSS free without ads.

I’m wondering…

Do you know how Yahoo BOSS is different from Google’s gData API ?
Have you used Google’s gData API ?
How will you be using Yahoo BOSS ?