Yahoo Revamps And Rehomes Search BOSS

Yahoo has relaunched and rehomed its search web services application programming interface (API) Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS), despite recent rumours that the search engine company may be up for sale.

The  BOSS platform, originally launched in 2008, enables developers to overlay Yahoo’s search infrastructure to create a search widget for their own websites.

No assembly required

According to the companySearch BOSS, the latest version now housed at boss.yahoo.com, will include three additional features – BOSS Hosted Search, BOSS Site Search and BOSS Shortcuts.

“The new offerings address: user engagement, traffic recirculation, monetisation, and high development and maintenance costs,” said the company in a blog post.

Hosted Search is a free-to-use, customisable web search tool, said the company, allowing websites to create their own search facility using Yahoo’s servers. Users can simply input their desired features, such as search refiners, image modules and other rich-content assets, and Hosted Search provides a “code snippet” which they can then be cut and pasted into their web pages.

Site Search indexes content on a website to create a more inward-looking, on-site search facility to keep customers focused on the site’s content.

Shortcuts offers a contextual keyword-based search function. It has been structured to analyse site content to give a more contextually-aware results to search terms defined by the page owner. Visitors can click on these terms and a “results” Window pops up.

“Our content-understanding technology analyses your pages and finds the terms most likely to engage your audience. Once clicked on, BOSS Shortcuts gives users a pop-up window filled with relevant results from your site, the Web, and our ad marketplace,” said the company.

While BOSS Hosted Search is available globally, without restriction, Site Search and Shortcuts are currently only available through Yahoo’s Private Alpha programme.