BOSS Update: Open Monetization, Pricing, Structured Data, and More
Today, we’re announcing a handful of new features for Yahoo! Search BOSS as well as important updates on our terms of service and pricing.
Three New Features
Perhaps the most important component of what we’re releasing today is access to SearchMonkey structured data through the BOSS API. The primary way in which SearchMonkey acquires structured data is by using the Yahoo! Web Crawler to scour the web for embedded semantic markup such as microformats or RDF. Starting today, all this data is available to BOSS API users.
The structured data that site owners share with us through feeds will be openly available in the near future if site owners opt to participate. You can read more about how it all works here, but it’s pretty straightforward – just add the “view=searchmonkey_feed” parameter to your API request and we’ll return all available structured data name-value pairs in DataRSS XML. You can also return semantic data in RDF XML using view=”searchmonkey_rdf”.
Here’s an XML example of structured data from President Obama’s LinkedIn page:
We’re excited to see what can be built with this data, so please tag your mashups and products with bossmashup on Delicious.
Second, building on our release of Key Terms last November and SearchMonkey structured data today, we’re also making Long Abstracts available. This is all part of an effort to provide a rich set of document-level data to BOSS developers – in this case a longer description of the page (up to 300 characters compared to 170 previously). You can access these by appending the “abstract=long” parameter to your API request.
Lastly, for years Site Explorer has been a valuable tool for webmasters to understand how Yahoo! Search is indexing their site. Site Explorer also allows users to obtain inlinks for domains and URLs, which are now available through two new BOSS services called se_inlink and se_pagedata.
Open Monetization & Pricing
Effective immediately, we have changed our terms of service to allow developers to use third party monetization platforms (ad-based or otherwise). For obvious reasons monetization is critical to the BOSS ecosystem, so to provide as many opportunities as possible we have decided to adjust our terms to provide developers with more flexibility.
Today we’re also announcing our plans for implementing usage fees for BOSS. We’re introducing fees for a couple of reasons. First and most importantly, we’re hard at work on a number of technologies that will enhance both the functionality and performance of BOSS, and usage fees will help support this development. For example, once we introduce pricing, developers will be able to request 1000 results in a single API call (instead of the current 50). We’ll also be introducing an SLA to ensure BOSS is a robust and stable service for developers. Second, we believe that introducing the proposed pricing structure will improve the ecosystem by optimizing capacity for our serious developers.
You can find all the details on how the fee structure will work here on the BOSS Usage Fees page. Instead of focusing on the particulars, we’ll share the principles we used in developing it. Our goal is to encourage adoption and usage with a low, but fair price – so as not to maximize revenue at the expense of trial and innovation. That is also why we’re going to provide up to 10,000 search queries per day (depending on the type of API call) free of charge to all developers. You’ll notice that the cost to developers is dependent not just on the number of queries requested, but also the type (i.e. how deep your query is). Rather than go with a simplistic “one size fits all” model, we feel that a “pay for what you use” approach is fairest for all types of users.
We’re announcing the fee structure months in advance of it taking effect (likely late Q2 of this year) because we want to give our developers as much advanced notice as possible, and also because we’re as interested as ever in your feedback – so feel free to comment below or on the BOSS developer forum.
Ashim Chhabra
Yahoo! Search BOSS Team
That looks promising.
Should I comment on this, or just post a suggestion? lol
I’m looking forward for a comparison cart to show the benefits of free vs paid version, you know? :)
How about monetization using Yahoo search ads (like that of Google’s adsense for search?)
Why stop the growth of Open platform in favor of restrictive unit based pricing system to make few pea nuts?
Even if Yahoo is able to charge 20% of total Boss platform queries, 2 Million paid queries will only make around $600/day.
How about monetization using Yahoo search ads??
I thought the whole point of BOSS was to partner with Yahoo and Share revenue adds. Is that still going to happen?
I am sure that would benifit Yahoo and the Site far greater than pay for quiries we can get close to 500 quiries a day and started this to eventually partner with Yahoo. I cant see much benifit with a pay model for us where is the reward for growth.
Shared ad revenues everyone wins
I thought about this a bit more.
We signed up to parter with Yahoo in taking on Google and sharing revenues through the Yahoo adds we provide our customers.
I think if there is going to be a charge there needs to be oppotunity for reward.
There needs to be some way to link the search result to relevant Yahoo adds. Like what happens with Google Custom search. Someone searches throught the custom search box and a relevant ad comes up . At the moment I display ads that appear after reading all the information on the screen not from whats in the search box. You get alot of ads that just are not relevant to what the customer or searcher is looking for. I get ads for the UK when I am have the Indian region. And US ads in the OZ region
Wotuseek.com
First of all I love the yahoo boss platform, but I must say am disappointed with the decision to charge for searches. In all of the previous literature said that we would be able to serve yahoo ads on our sites and share in the revenue. That agreement was the whole reason I (and probably others) decided to make a few search engines based on the yahoo boss platform. There was no downside risk (other that my web hosting payments), and potentially there was great upside risk.
Now I will have to look at my 2 search engines that I spent a lot of time developing and try to determine whether they would be cash flow positive in the event they got a lot of traffic. I may just have to shut them down if they ever got popular. I was thinking about making a few other search engines, but it is now not worth the time to me, as there is now a risk of loss.
In the future, will you be adding the choice to serve yahoo ads and have free searches instead of only having to pay for searches? With this choice developers could effectively limit their downside risk, and have the choice to switch to more lucrative ads in the future if they desired.
Why should Yahoo! give this service away for free? It’s up to them to decide how to make money on it, just like it’s up to any of us to decide how we should make money in our businesses.
I may be wrong, but my honest perception of this service is that Yahoo! really believes that making the BOSS service as open, flexible, and available as possible is going to lead to big things for them and the developers who participate.
If they price it too high, that whole concept will fail. If you’re looking for a free handout, you should be knocking on the Feds door. In my experience, if you’re idea can’t make enough money to pay even multiple times what Yahoo! is suggesting, you might as well just link to Yahoo! Search instead of wasting your time developing an unprofitable solution.
Thanks for BOSS Yahoo! — 10,000 queries/day is plenty for me to prove whether my idea is viable, especially since I can do it all without restrictions on delivery to my users.
I agree that Yahoo Boss should have a pricing scheme to help subsidize the huge cost of the services provided. My main concern as a Boss developer is if Yahoo will offer discounts on volume API calls?
Time will tell.
I’m trying to use the new se_inlink but the omit_inlinks variable isn’t filtering results like it should be.
ex:
http://boss.yahooapis.com/ysearch/se_inlink/v1/www.hidefdvd.com/i/dvd/FOX2257499DVD.htm?appid=YahooDemo&omit_inlinks=domain&entire_site=no&format=xml&count=5
the 1st links all contain the domain http://www.hidefdvd.com even though I say to omit them in the query
I agree that Yahoo Boss should have a pricing scheme to help subsidize the huge cost of the services provided. My main concern as a Boss developer is if Yahoo will offer discounts on volume API calls?
Are you kidding me Yahoo? Why would i pay for this service when i can use Google custom search and share in the revenues? Stop trying to re-invent the wheel, you will generate more money in the long run with rev share. You will never learn and MSN is going to kick your ass soon if you keep this up. STUPID!