Yahoo has introduced several new developer innovations to its Yahoo Search BOSS API, allowing increased access to structured data and longer abstracts. In addition, Yahoo plans to implement usage fees for BOSS, likely late in the second quarter of 2009, which the company believes will optimize capacity for developers.
Yahoo
has announced a few updates to the Yahoo Search BOSS API
that could prove useful to developers looking to boost how the search giant
ranks their Web sites.
BOSS, which stands for Build Your Own Search Service, is an
open-search Web services platform, produced by Yahoo, that allows developers to
create their own search products.
First among these changes is allowing developers access, via
the BOSS API, to the structured
data that Yahoo SearchMonkey has pulled from Web sites via Yahoo Web Crawler. Developers
can then use this structured data to control the appearance of Yahoo search
results.
SearchMonkey,
which
made its debut in May 2008, is an integral part of the Yahoo Open Strategy,
which embraces the concept of allowing its 500 million-plus users to freely
share content.
Two additional BOSS features include Long Abstracts - which
introduces a lengthier character limit for abstracts, providing more URL-level
information - and Site Explorer, which allows access to domain and sub-domain
inbound links and page links, so Web masters can see how Yahoo is indexing
their sites.
"It allows you to do interesting things with relevancy," said
Bill Michels, senior director of Open Search for Yahoo.
In addition, Yahoo will also be implementing usage fees for
BOSS in the second quarter. The new pricing structure will be based on CPM fees
for the BOSS API. Depending on the
query type, up to 10,000 API calls
will be free for developers; after that, a fee structure will kick into
effect.
"The theme with our road map is to give developers access to
as much tools and data as possible," Michels added. "We want that
functionality and tools to be available to everybody."
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