YAHOO! SEARCH BOSS

Tathagato Rai Dastidar (dastidar@yahoo-inc.com)

Engineering Manager for BOSS

WHAT IS BOSS?

BUILD OWN SEARCH Service

WHAT DOES BOSS GIVE YOU?

Search Data and Infrastructure

Monetization (We give you Ads!!)

Support and Tools

BOSS is a service that provides you (the developer) flexible access to different types of data from Yahoo and allows you to build powerful commercial search applications with that data.

BOSS provides you Search Advertising and simple terms so that you can monetize that innovative product and continue to invest your personal time in it.

BOSS also gives you Support and Tools to get your product working.

Restful XML and JSON API

Web, Image, Spelling, News and Search Ads

More services soon

Flexibility to Blend and Re-rank Results

Create your own look and feel

Change ranking

Mix it with other API’s

oAuth based Authentication

WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?

WHAT ELSE DO YOU GET

Web and Limited Web results (smaller subset and at most 3 days old)

Complex query combinations and filters

Search for data in different markets

Image attributes like height, width, etc

Time span filtering for News Search

Document type filtering

Extended abstracts

Recognizes most search filters from Yahoo! and Google (backdoor hacks)

HOW DO I HACK WITH IT?

HOW DO I SIGN UP

Self-serve sign up with simple Credit

Card/Paypal payment options Visit BOSS Page or wait until the end for pricing

Simplified pricing based on query type

A combined bill for developers taking

Search Advertising

One signup, use in any market

Don’t bother for now, we have a key setup for you

THE QUERY

Tells you what the user is looking for

Powers secondary APIs

Can be generated by a search box, URL,

tags or keyword extraction from the page.

Generates related topics

The Query is your BFF!

e.g. http://yboss.yahooapis.com/ysearch/web?q=“Dark Knight”&format=xml

SAMPLE CALLS

Getting multiple data sets

/ysearch/web,images,news?q=obama

/ysearch/web,images,news?web.q=obama&images.q=flower&news.q=egypt

Searching through sites

A Simple Movie Search

/ysearch/web?q=“Dark Knight”&

sites=movies.yahoo.com,netflix.com,imdb.com

AND/OR operators

/ysearch/web?q="steve

jobs"AND((ipad)OR(iphone))&sites=bestbuy.com,newegg.com

Important: Use Braces or quotes

UNARY OPERATORS

Search for Batman but not “Dark Knight”

q=(batman -“Dark Knight")

Find pages with “Heath Ledger” but not “Dark

Knight”

q=+”heath ledger”–”Dark

Knight”&sites=movies.yahoo.com

Force auto-spelling off

q=+”drk knight”

AND OR

SEARCHING IN BODY AND IN TITLE

Searching for Dark Knight in the Title on Yahoo movies

q=reviews intitle:"dark knight"&sites=movies.yahoo.com

Searching for Dark Knight in the Title in Yahoo movies containing Christian Bale

q=reviews intitle:"dark knight" inbody:"christian bale"&sites=movies.yahoo.com

MARKET AND DOCUMENT SPECIFIC FILTERS

Search for “Dark Knight” in India specific sites q=“Dark Knight”&market=en-in

Search for “PDF’s containing “Dark Knight” q=“Dark Knight”&type=pdf

Search for MS Office type (except PPT’s) containing “Dark Knight”

q=“Dark Knight”&type=msoffice,-ppt

OUTPUT

IMAGE SEARCH PARAMETERS

Search for images that are not offensive

/ysearch/images?q=“san francisco”&filter=yes

Search for images that are wallpaper size

/ysearch/images?q=“san francisco”&dimensions=wallpaper

Search for a image at a certain refer URL

/ysearch/images?q=yahoo&refererurl=http://www.flickr.com

Interesting Output Fields

format, file size, height, width, title, total result count

NEWS SEARCH PARAMETERS

Search news that is less than 7 days old

/ysearch/news?q=osama&age=7d

Search news that is between 20hrs and 2 days old

/ysearch/news?q=osama&age=20h2d

Re-rank news results by date

/ysearch/news?q=osama&ranking=true

Interesting Output Fields

Source, Date, Source URL

BOSS + YQL

Table Name: boss.search

e.g. select * from boss.search where ck=… and secret=… and q=‘yahoo’ and service=‘news’

Parameters Example

Consumer Key ck -

Consumer Secret secret -

Query Term q ‘yahoo’

Service service ‘news’

BOSS HACK PACKET

PBWorks Site

• This presentation

• oAuth information

• Code Samples available

• PHP, Ruby, Perl

Old BOSS Hacks: http://bosshacks.com

Tweet your hacks #ysearchboss, #openhackeu

Follow me at @ysearchboss

Special BOSS prize

UNDERSTAND OAUTH

IdentificationConsumer Key – Used to make a call to the API

Consumer Secret – Used for 3 legged oAuth (not used for BOSS)

Making a call

(www.oauth.net/code)-Consumer Key

-Nonce – Random string generated by oAuth (prevents replay attacks)

-Signature – Generated by library

-Signature Method – Various types of methods supported (e.g. HMAC-SHA1)

-oAuth Timestamp –Unix time (valid for 5 minutes only)

-oAuth version – 1.0

We have code samples in PHP, Perl, Ruby for you!!

HACK IDEAS AND USEFUL API’S

RealTime

Twitter/Facebook API

Video

YouTube data API

Vertical search engines

Programmable web has interesting API’s

Local Search Engines

Yahoo Geocoding services e.g. Placefinder

Chrome extensions

Mobile Applications

EXAMPLE HACKS

DUCKDUCKGO.COM

INTERCEDER

INQUISITOR: BROWSER EXTENSTION (v1)

24

Hack: http://www.inquisitorx.com/firefox/index_en.php

ASK-BOSS (v1)

Hack: http://ask-boss.appspot.com Code: https://github.com/saurabhsahni/Hacks/tree/master/askBOSS

MORE RESOURCES

Yahoo! BOSS: http://developer.yahoo.com/boss

BOSS Technical Documentation:

http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/boss_api_guide/

YQL: http://developer.yahoo.com/yql

Fire Eagle: http://developer.yahoo.com/fireeagle/

Google App Engine: http: //appengine.google.com

Amazon Web Services: http://aws.amazon.com

oAuth: http://oauth.net/

Open Social: http://www.opensocial.org/

Open Data: http://theinfo.org

Alt Search Engines: http://www.altsearchengines.com/

MONETIZATION AND OTHER YAHOO SEARCH SERVICES

BOSS MONETIZATION

Two business Models

CPM Only

CPM + RPM

We give you Ads and a revenue share

Daily reporting for Ads

Extensive Support through Syndication partner

Data Type Web Limited Web Images News Spelling

Price (1000 queries) $0.80 $0.40 $0.30 $0.10 $0.10

OTHER YAHOO SEARCH SERVICES

Yahoo! Hosted Search

Yahoo! hosted service for Web

search

Limited display flexibility

No costs associated with the service

No Blending/Re-ranking

Revenue share from

Ads

Yahoo! Site Search

Yahoo! hosted site search solution

Better relevance algorithm based on

type of content

Web backfill of results

Yahoo! Search Ads

with revenue share