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)
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
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
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
