Siva Kumar

There are a lot of vertical content sites that will no doubt tap into the BOSS offering from Yahoo, as the strength of Yahoo’s overall search comprehensiveness has been a missing piece of the puzzle for such sites. This also opens a whole new realm of innovation from startups in areas like semantic search and social search in particular, and kudos to Yahoo for opening the door to further push that envelope.

However, the emerging vertical search engines particularly in areas like real estate, job search, travel and shopping, all require deep vertical crawling and subject-specific classification technology that is not available in Yahoo Search and the BOSS offering does not change this. As in our case, TheFind.com was developed with the sole purpose of creating the best shopping search experience for consumers that embraces core, comprehensive search technology and thorough classification of products and stores as a starting point. As such, our powerful technology successfully competes and often surpasses the usefulness of product search results offered by the likes of Yahoo and Google, and our growing popularity with consumers attests to our proprietary vertical search technology. We do believe that the Yahoo BOSS announcement definitely validates the need for comprehensiveness in vertical search applications and ups the ante for players in vertical spaces.

We will be introducing more shopping -centric technology before the Holiday season that will apply innovative software to better addresses real-world shopping behavior. Stay tuned.

Alex Zivkovic
This makes a huge difference for alternative search engines such as ours at www.cluuz.com. As part of the Yahoo! BOSS alpha process we implemented the new API and from personal experience with the BOSS team I can tell you that they have a great vision. With this move Yahoo! is fostering innovation in the search space as the Alts are the ones doing all the interesting work in search these days.





Elliott Ng

First of all congratulations to Yahoo! “Rebel Alliance” for taking this first step on what might be a disruptive move to compete against the Don’t-Be-Evil Empire! (h/t Dave McClure who coined this phrase). Now you will have to Use The Force and go much further to power an industry of distinctively unique Alternative Search Engines, like Uptake. (Disclosure: we are not using BOSS but plan to evaluate BOSS Custom for our use on providing backfill results)
BOSS: one of Yahoo!’s last hopes
Photo courtesy: Revell.de

But it took more than an X-Wing to destroy the Death Star. It Took the Force.

Here are the salient features of BOSS and where we think it has to go further to truly power innovative new search experiences.

Three levels, but only BOSS Custom has real potential for a highly differentiated service offering.

There are three levels to the BOSS program, according to SearchEngineWatch:

• self-service API
• BOSS University for academics
• BOSS Custom, designed for companies with their own ranking and/or presentation methodologies. Or alternative, companies with proprietary data that can help as an additional signal that factors into relevancy.

I’ll go over all the aspects of the BOSS program below, and then come back to BOSS Custom as evidence that Yahoo! just might Use The Force. But the basic features looks like a free version of Google Custom Search Engine.
Please read the rest of Elliott’s post on the UpTake.com blog here:




The hakia Blog
We are pleased to announce our participation in Yahoo!’s Search BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) today. As part of this initiative, we have access to one of the largest Web directories on the Internet, which accelerates hakia’s QDEXing process and semantic analysis of the Web’s content. QDEXing is a critical element that replaces traditional index to allow scalable semantic search. Without this kind of infrastructure, application of semantic technology is destined to be limited, such as covering Wikipedia only.

The search landscape is currently in a dynamic stage of reinvention. Yahoo! is inviting more innovation to enter the market, while Microsoft validates the importance of semantic search technology with its recent acquisition of Powerset. For the latter, we congratulate both parties, yet are disappointed by the fact that we’ve lost our favorite competitor. From now on, we will look for traces of the Powerset-effect in LiveSearch.

For hakia’s part, we will continue the momentum as we keep up our progress towards coming out of BETA later this year. As we always say, the every day application of semantic technology is an irreversible, long-overdue process. It is coming…


Yakov Sadchikov

We’ve been using it to power web and image search on Quintura.com since Nov 2006. Apart from, for example, a visual representation of search results, one needs better relevancy and deepness of search as well as better monetization system. Yahoo! does not have that.

Their search API is becoming more open and flexible but a way they index the web is no better than Google or Microsoft..

We believe that the best way of “beating” Google is not by building a better search destination site, but by changing the paradigm - GIVE REASONS FOR USERS NOT TO MAKE A DECISION TO GO TO A SEARCH ENGINE. Because when the think search engine, they think Google..

Then we move into powering site search for web portals and making more interactive. Maxim.com and Cosmo.ru (Russian Cosmopolitan magazine’s site) are the first who realized that they can keep site visitors on the site longer with Quintura. Here is more on http://blog.quintura.com

Essentially we are creating environments where users just keep exploring the passions, their interests, their information needs from where they are on the web. People go to search engines when they cant find what they want where they are!

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 3:48 pm and is filed under Guest Authors, News, Alts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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