Yahoo! 'Boss' offers up search to build on

In an attempt to boost its search-ad business, Yahoo! has begun a project that lets anyone build a customised search engine atop the internet company's technology.

The service, which entered public beta testing last night, is called Boss (Build Your Own Search Service). With it, someone can build an independent website with a search box, pass users' queries to Boss, process the results returned by Yahoo!'s search engines in any manner, and display the results.

Essentially, Boss is a bid to enable others' search innovation then share profits from the results. It's also the most significant example to date of Yahoo! Open Strategy, the company's effort to expose its own technology for outside developers in an effort to become a more indispensable part of the internet.

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The Boss API to Yahoo!'s search is free to use but Boss partners that succeed will be required to show search ads, said Prabhakar Raghavan, chief strategist for Yahoo! Search.

Raghavan said: "We fully expect it to expand the footprint of Yahoo! search advertising on the web. There is no payment of any kind we expect from partners but we do say in the terms of service up front that over time we will require them as they build and grow out to use our search advertising."

That's a strong statement in light of Google's rapid ascent and strength in the market. Even Yahoo!, faced with intense shareholder pressure and a hostile takeover attempt by Microsoft, has tried to hitch itself to Google through a search-ad deal with its rival.

With Boss Yahoo! hopes to attract both entrepreneurs and researchers - it has formal Boss partnership with Stanford University in the US, the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and other educational sites.

Yahoo! has already launched a program called SearchMonkey that lets programmers augment Yahoo!'s search results with richer displays of information - for example by adding starred reviews or addresses to restaurants listed in search results. That's a skin-deep change compared to what Boss permits, however, where outside sites can completely alter the order of search results, filter out particular results, display results only of a particular variety, and combine the Yahoo! data with internal data.

Yahoo! offered some examples of what could be done with Boss. One idea is a visual search presentation that shows miniature versions of the web pages atop the textual results. Another - social search - could be used to spotlight results relevant to attributes drawn from a person's social network.

With Boss, Yahoo! offers use of its own hardware in exchange for search-ad revenue. It might well be that no single company becomes as dominant as the top three search engines - Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft - but that collectively the smaller players offer more alternatives, Raghavan said.

Monetisation of Boss through search ads is "a few months away", he said.

Original article: Yahoo seeks ad revenue by fueling others' search innovation from CNET News.com