Boss - Hack U 2012 - IIT Madras

1. Hacking BOSS
Sudhir Reddy
Hacker @Yahoo

2. BOSS … What ?
• BOSS = Build your Own Search Service
• Open Yahoo’s core search features via web services
to let 3rd parties revolutionize Search
• Monetization - Ads Service : 3rd parties revenue
share
• Pay per use model. Don’t worry will give you free
access for hacking 
“BOSS is a data API. It’s not a search API”
- Vik Singh, BOSS Architect

3. BOSS Details
• REST based API.
• XML or JSON output
• Web, News, Image, SiteSearch, and Spelling
Suggestion services
• Time span filtering for News Search
• Image attributes like height, width, etc
• Document type filtering
• Delicious Tags and Popularity
• Keyterm extraction
• Microformat and RDF data
• Extended abstracts
• Complex query combinations and filters
• Search for data in different markets
• Recognizes most search filters from Yahoo! and
Google (backdoor hacks)

4. BOSS … Authentication ?
• OAUTH 1.0
• HTTP headers or GET params
• Self-serve sample code available
– PHP: http://oauth.net/code
– Perl: http://search.cpan.org/dist/Net-OAuth/
– Ruby: https://gist.github.com/383159
– C#:
http://oauth.googlecode.com/svn/code/csharp/OAuth
Base.cs
– Java: http://code.google.com/p/oauth-signpost/

5. Boss APIs … Data Request ?
http://yboss.yahooapis.com/ysearch/{service,*}?q
={keywords}
http://yboss.yahooapis.com/ysearch/{service,*}ser
vice1.q={keywords}&service2.q={keywords}
Arguments: service, q, start, count, market, format, callback, sites
Operators: And, Or, +(Include), -(Exclude)

6. What can I Hack ?
• Some Useful Data Sources to mashup:
Y! Answers, Twitter, Youtube, Wolfram Alpha, Delicious,
Flickr, Facebook, Wikipedia, Foursquare, Open Data,
IMDB, Amazon, Netflix, Craigslist, TheInfo.org
and more…

7. Previous Hack:
http://ask-boss.appspot.com

8. Previous Hack:
http://keywordfinder.org

9. Previous Hack: 4hoursearch.com

10. Inquisitor: Browser Extension

11. Resources
• Yahoo! BOSS: http://developer.yahoo.com/boss
• YQL: http://developer.yahoo.com/yql
• OAuth: http://developer.yahoo.com/oauth/
• YUI: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/
• Everything@YDN :
http://developer.yahoo.com/everything.html
• Google App Engine:
http://appengine.google.com
• Amazon Web Services: http://aws.amazon.com
• Open Data: http://theinfo.org

12. Happy Hacking 