Last week Yahoo introduced BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) . BOSS is Yahoo!’s open search web services platform. This could be interesting. I am curious to see what developers and other start-ups may use BOSS for and if any interesting web-scale search products will see the light using BOSS. I personally would like to utilize the entire Yahoo image search index :) I see BOSS as allowing some search startups and developers to take a bit of an indexing short cut which when you are launching a new search service could be very useful.
From Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb: Senior Director of the Open Search Platform, Bill Michels told us that niche search engines often aren’t very good because they have access to a very limited index of content. It’s expensive to index the whole web. Likewise, Michels said that there are a substantial number of large organizations that have a huge amount of content but don’t have world-class search technology.
In both cases, Yahoo! BOSS is intended to level the playing field and blow the Big 3 wide open. We agree that it’s very exciting to imagine thousands of new Yahoo! powered niche search engines proliferating. Could Yahoo! plus the respective strengths and communities of all these new players challenge Google? We think they could.
I think so too. So let’s go build something and see what happens. I have a few ideas I would like to experiment with.
