Yahoo! Search BOSS Adds Blog Search

Yahoo! Search BOSS continues to thrive with today’s introduction of our fifth service, Blog Search (Beta).

A custom blog index

Developers looking for a blog search API often find the APIs that do exist are providing a variation of a web index. We decided to take a different approach. Yahoo! developed a custom blog index where the relevancy is specifically tuned for blogs. This allows us to provide you a wealth of data such as the provider, the author, date of post and in certain cases, contextually relevant terms associated with the article. Explore the documentation to learn more.

Complex queries

By their very nature, web indices used for blog search cannot provide the complex functionality that developers demand. For example, try finding a commercial API that will give you all the blog articles written on “Yahoo” in the last week sorted by date. Yes, I know, I couldn’t find one either. Developers can now make that exact query on BOSS and build a rich powerful application. As always, BOSS developers get maximum flexibility on the display of this data.

How much does it cost?

If you are thinking, wow that is cool, but it must be expensive, you are wrong. We are charging only $0.10 for 1000 queries.

Can I show Ads and make money on my search?

Yahoo! Search BOSS allows users to apply for advertising as a part of the sign up process, which provides you an opportunity to make money. We encourage users to build a commercial offering by leveraging BOSS.

How do I sign up?

If you have already signed up for BOSS, then you can start using Blog Search (Beta) immediately. Yes, read the documentation and start updating your site to make the appropriate calls. If you are new to BOSS, follow the simple step-by-step instructions and sign up at our BOSS site. Also explore the other services such as web search, image search and news search that we offer through BOSS.

What’s next?

As we said before, BOSS continues to hold great promise. We have hundreds of developer sites using it for millions of queries every day. We have seen fascinating applications in social, mobile and on the web that are using the service. Our goal is to nurture and grow this ecosystem by continuing to add new services and helping you monetize your offering. So without giving too much away, our next goal is to shake things up in mobile. Yes, get ready!! And no, we don’t plan a BOSS OS.

– Rahul Hampole, Yahoo! Search BOSS team