Tech Shout!

Yahoo! has introduced Search BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service), a new web services platform. This service will offer third parties a facility of re-ranking and controlling the presentation of website search results. Yahoo! search is now available as an API in beta from today.

“Today, the search market is generally limited to three major search engines to drive innovation and growth,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, chief strategist for Yahoo! Search. “BOSS opens up the playing field for developers and companies to disrupt the search market, become principals in search and build new Web search experiences that offer more choice for users.”

Further Yahoo! claims that BOSS offers an access to its algorithmic search infrastructure without incurring the significant costs required to build web-scale search experiences. That means Yahoo partners are provided with an opportunity to offer industry leading search results. Moreover, BOSS enables controlling over the presentation and ranking of web search results and also unlimited queries per day.

A BOSS monetization capability, using Yahoo! search advertising and potentially other models is intended to be made available or partners and developers to create a search revenue stream for their business in coming months.