A slide deck presented at YDN Hack Days Europe 2011 (@openhackeu)

2. YAHOO! SEARCH BOSS
Rahul Hampole
Product Manager and Unofficial Evangelist

3. WHAT IS BOSS?
BUILD OWN SEARCH Service

4. WHAT DOES BOSS GIVE YOU?
 Search Data and Infrastructure
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.
 Monetization (We give you Ads!!)
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
 Support and Tools get your product working.

5. WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?
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

6. 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
Microformat and RDF data
Extended abstracts
Recognizes most search filters from Yahoo! and Google (backdoor hacks)

7. HOW DO I HACK WITH IT?

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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”

12. 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

13. MARKET AND DOCUMENT SPECIFIC FILTERS
 Search for “Dark Knight” in Romania specific
sites
 q=“Dark Knight”&market=ro-ro
 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

14. OUTPUT

15. 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

16. 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

17. BOSS + YQL
Table Name: boss.search
Parameters Example
Consumer Key ck -
Consumer Secret secret -
Query Term q ‘yahoo’
Service service ‘news’
e.g. select * from boss.search where ck=… and
secret=… and q=„yahoo‟ and service=„news‟

18. 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

19. UNDERSTAND OAUTH
Identification
Consumer 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!!

20. 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

21. EXAMPLE HACKS

22. DUCKDUCKGO.COM

23. INTERCEDER

24. INQUISITOR: BROWSER EXTENSTION (v1)
Hack: http://www.inquisitorx.com/firefox/index_en.php
24

25. ASK-BOSS (v1)
Hack: http://ask-boss.appspot.com
Code: https://github.com/saurabhsahni/Hacks/tree/master/askBOSS

26. 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/

27. MONETIZATION
AND
OTHER YAHOO SEARCH
SERVICES

28. BOSS MONETIZATION
Two business Models
 CPM Only
Data Type Web Limited Images News Spelling
Web
Price (1000 queries) $0.80 $0.40 $0.30 $0.10 $0.10
 CPM + RPM
 We give you Ads and a revenue share
Daily reporting for Ads
Extensive Support through Syndication partner

29. OTHER YAHOO SEARCH SERVICES
Yahoo! Hosted Search Yahoo! Site Search
Yahoo! hosted service for Web search Yahoo! hosted site search solution
Limited display flexibility Better relevance algorithm based on
No costs associated with the service type of content
No Blending/Re-ranking Web backfill of results
Revenue share from Yahoo! Search Ads with
Ads revenue share