Yahoo’s new release of BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is exciting news for companies interested in developing their own search engine based products. Basically what they’ve done is invited any developers to use Yahoo’s technical know how, in the shape of their Search index, as a foundation. But why give this technology away so freely?
I’ll let them speak for themselves on that question.
BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is Yahoo!’s open search web services platform. The goal of BOSS is simple: to foster innovation in the search industry. Developers, start-ups, and large Internet companies can use BOSS to build and launch web-scale search products that utilize the entire Yahoo! Search index.
BOSS gives you access to Yahoo!’s investments in crawling and indexing, ranking and relevancy algorithms, and powerful infrastructure. By combining your unique assets and ideas with our search technology assets, BOSS is a platform for the next generation of search innovation, serving hundreds of millions of users across the Web.
It also says on their Developer Network, “With BOSS, developers and start-ups now have the technology and infrastructure to build next generation search solutions that can compete head-to-head with the principals in the search industry.”
Considering they themselves are one of the principals, what does Yahoo get out of this apart from the warm glow of seeing their core technology utilized by many different companies?
I honestly don’t know. Maybe you can figure it out. That didn’t stop me from wanting to pass the information along though! Please do comment if you have any bright ideas on this.
In the meantime I’ll be keeping my ear to the ground. Stay tuned.
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