Yahoo touts search mashups built with Boss
Published: 08 Aug 2008 14:44 BST
A month after the launch of Boss — an application programming interface (API) that lets developers build a customised search engine on top of Yahoo's technology — the company is showing off mashups built using the product.
Yahoo's Boss (Build Your Own Search Service) interface allows web users to build an independent search website, send search queries to Yahoo, and process and display the results in various formats, while boosting Yahoo's search-ad business.
So far, the ideas have been related to news and sports search, as well as general search.
For example, 4hoursearch, took four hours to build with a combination of Boss and Yahoo User Interface design tools. It provides Yahoo search results in a style reminiscent of Cuil, stating on the front page that it 'surfs enough sites' — an apparent retort to Cuil's claim to have launched with three times more web pages indexed than Google.
Some of the more interesting mashups aim to aid niche web users. For sports lovers, the PlayerSearch sports search engine (see below) pulls in content from a host of sources, displaying search results in categories such as podcasts, videos, national news and columns, Flickr photos, or stories from satirical website The Onion.
The mashup 'winner', as declared by Yahoo Boss bloggers, was Dipity, which also showed off its meme timeline on Thursday.
The site paired its timeline application with Daylife News, using the Boss API to make NewsLine (see bottom image). By comparing two topics (John McCain and Barack Obama, for example) or simply searching for news about one topic, the search results are rendered in timeline form.
Yahoo has promised that even more mashups, and perhaps new popular search sites, are on the way.
Credit: Yahoo's BOSS touts its search site creations from CNET News
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