A couple of weeks ago, Yahoo! Search visited Tel Aviv, Israel as part of our international BOSS Hack Day series. Our goal with these Hack Days is to educate developers around the world on Yahoo! Search BOSS, share where the platform is headed and foster the development of innovative new search experiences using BOSS.

The BOSS team got together with 100 developers and entrepreneurs in Tel Aviv for a detailed presentation on the BOSS API, presented in Hebrew by BOSS Engineering Director Eran Palmon. After the presentation, developers had the chance to build their own mashup creations that were then reviewed by a panel of judges. We received 20+ mashups and judging is complete.

Drum roll, please…

The winning team, Get the Pic, wrote an addictive phrase guessing game (similar to Hang-Man), based on Yahoo! BOSS image, news and web search APIs.

The ingenuity and entrepreneurship exhibited at the Hack Day in Tel Aviv was encouraging, especially as we continue to forge our relationship with developers in this region. In fact, Delver, an Israel-based social search company, recently launched its search engine powered in part by BOSS. There’s no doubt that we’ll continue to see new and inventive search experiences from developers there.

For more details on our developer event in Tel Aviv, check out this recent post from the Yahoo! Developer Network. We’ve captured more photos of the event as well.

Farewell for now, Tel Aviv…see you in 2009.

Sophie Major
YDN International & Honorary BOSS Team Member

Today we’re pleased to announce the availability of the first of a series of new BOSS features called Key Terms.

We began opening up our search infrastructure four months ago with Yahoo! Search BOSS. Since then, we’ve heard again and again in our developer group and at conferences and hack days around the world that developers want more access to deep infrastructure assets.

Key Terms is derived from a Yahoo! Search capability we refer to internally as “Prisma.” This is the same patented technology that powers Search Assist. Key Terms is an ordered terminological representation of what a document is about. The ordering of terms is based on each term’s frequency and its positional and contextual heuristics.

How could it be used? Obviously it could be used as the basis for assistance and refinement technology (as we’ve done with Search Assist), but that’s hardly the only possible application. Key Terms could be highly useful as input to semantic analysis or new relevancy models. They could also be used to analyze and cluster similar documents or as a vehicle for new visual experiences.

For an example of Key Terms in use check out Tartin3.com. It’s a Parisian food search engine built by our very own epicurean developer Ted Drake. The “Related Terms” refiners under each result are pulled directly from Key Terms.

To provide API access to Key Terms, we’re introducing a new universal parameter called “view.” View is the argument that will provide a lens into deeper content. Appending “&view=keyterms” to the BOSS Web Search API call will result in Key Terms being included in the response.

In the example below, we included Key Terms in a query for obama. Each result contains up to 20 terms describing the document. The terms below describe the first result, for Change.gov.

Check out the BOSS documentation for all the details of how you can use Key Terms and other BOSS functionality. Last but not least, we’ve added Romanian, Hebrew, and Turkish language/region support to the BOSS APIs – details are also included in the documentation.

If you have any questions or feedback, we encourage you to post them to the BOSS group. We’re committed to continuing to open our infrastructure and technology to developers, start-ups and established Internet companies, so if you have any thoughts on what should be next, we’re all ears.

Ashim Chhabra
The BOSS Team

We just returned from two solid events on the BOSS Hack Day world tour. Last Monday’s event in London drew a range of developers, including a few who were completely new to the platform along with a handful of experienced BOSS hackers (such as the developer from BuildaSearch).

After a successful stop in London, the team headed to Paris to prepare for another event on Wednesday.

The Paris event stood out for a couple of reasons. First, we were really pleased with the turnout. The event was held at a well-known Parisian coworking center called La Cantine, which seemed to be at the hub of the developer community in Paris… it was packed. Even more impressive was how engaged everyone was. We started with a one-hour overview and technical discussion, broke for sushi and beer and then split into two workshops — one on the BOSS Mashup Framework and one on building niche search engines using the BOSS API.

Almost all of the developers stayed until 10:30 or later that evening to learn more about BOSS and shared some excellent feedback on where we should take the product. Although neither of us speaks a lick of French, we had some great conversations. We met with the folks from Veosearch, a BOSS-powered search engine that gives a percentage of its profits to charity, as well as the guys from Iminent, an IM add-on and contextual search company.

We’d like to thank all the developers who joined us. Hearing directly from you about new features you’d like to see will help us prioritize our efforts in 2009. Also, big thanks to the Yahoo! teams in London and Paris for all their help in setting up and running the events.

If you weren’t able to join us, we’ll continue to host developer events in the coming months. In the meantime, you can check out more photos and the slides from our presentation.

Graham Mudd & Vik Singh
BOSS Team

The BOSS team recently participated in Open Hack 2008 to promote innovation and openness in search. Developers came out in full force to create hacks and mashups using Yahoo! Search BOSS. With the success of our event in Sunnyvale, we decided to take Hack Day on the road.

We’re inviting developers to take part in one of our Hack Days around the world. We’ll be sharing where the platform is headed, leading technical discussions and encouraging developers to start building innovative new search experiences using BOSS.

Our first Hack Day kicks off in Tel Aviv on November 6th. If you’re interested, sign up here. We’ll be hosting or participating in Hack Days throughout November, so check out the schedule below and join us if you can:

• Sao Paulo: November 8 – 9, 2008 @ SENAC University
• London: November 10, 2008 @ Wallacespace
• Paris November 12, 2008 @ La Cantine

We’ll also be hosting events in South East Asia and India in the near future, so check back here for more details on where we’ll be

We hope you can come hack with us!

The BOSS team

As we announced on October 14, Kallout, a contextual search product, won the BOSS Mashable Challenge. Part of the first prize for the Challenge was a guest post on Mashable, which was posted today. Kallout is a great example of how BOSS can quickly be integrated into products and mash-ups to power next generation search experiences – so give their article a read.

The BOSS Team

A few weeks ago, the BOSS team invited a handful of the top academic minds in information retrieval to join us at our Sunnyvale campus for the BOSS Academic Research Day. In addition to the professors and grad students from Stanford, MIT, UMass, University of Illinois and Purdue, we also invited ten senior researchers from Yahoo!.

We had several goals for the day: to share knowledge, exchange ideas and gather product feedback. Our researchers presented their vision for where search is headed and summarized a number of the toughest research challenges we face as a company and industry. The academics shared summaries of how they’re currently using BOSS in their research as well as how they’d like to use it in the future. That’s where the product feedback came in.

Our academic colleagues didn’t hold back when it came to sharing how we could expand and improve their access to our technology and we were glad they didn’t. For example, they told us which elements of our index would be particularly helpful in conducting research and how challenging it is to conduct research without access to real query traffic.

In a recent article, CNET summarized the event and why we think working with the academic community is so important. Here are a couple pics from the day – the rest are on flickr.

We’d like to thank our academic partners for making the trip and sharing their perspectives – they will serve as important feedback into our roadmap for the next year.

Graham Mudd
BOSS Team

Last week, the finalists of the BOSS Mashable Challenge were announced and readers had a chance to vote for their favorites. Mashable has now announced the lucky winners. But first, here’s a reminder of the finalists:

• TuneChimp – Music search
• socialmention – People/social networking search
• CopyrightSpot – Original content search
• KallOut – Selection-based search
• PopGist - Discussion/topic aggregation
• Surf Canyon – Real-time results re-ranking
• Tall Street – Web search using community voting
• iMusicMash – Social music app for iPhone

Our favorite aspect of the Challenge was seeing such a wide variety of mashups. Developers submitted apps built on a bunch of platforms – OS, browser, web and iPhone. And while a lot of the mashups focused on tweaking the current web search paradigm, many were highly specialized (such as CopyrightSpot) or vertically focused (e.g. PlayerSearch). A handful of apps even focused on new ranking algorithms (e.g. Surf Canyon).

Drumroll please…

After 5 days of voting and thousands of votes, the community has spoken. We’re happy to announce that KallOut is the first prize winner and socialmention takes the runner-up prize. Mashable will be profiling KallOut and its developer soon, so keep your eyes peeled for a post.

We’d like to thank Mashable and all the developers who participated in the challenge. Congratulations to KallOut and socialmention!

The BOSS Team

Voting is a critical element of your responsibility as a developer or tech enthusiast. Making your voice heard can help shape the future of the web. It’s also fun to share your opinion on what the candidates have to offer.

Oh, you thought we were talking about the General Election? Nope. While we agree that it’s admittedly more important to vote in that election, we’re referring to the BOSS Mashable Challenge – and the candidates, well they’re 10 really innovative mashups built using Yahoo! Search BOSS.

So check out Mashable’s latest post, kick the tires on the 10 finalists and make your voice heard before the deadline – this Sunday at midnight. There have already been 4,000 votes, so be sure to add yours.

The BOSS Team

Two weeks ago, we announced that the BOSS Mashable Challenge was on. Since then, we’ve heard a lot of interest in BOSS and seen some great submissions, but we want to give you a little more time to work on your hacks. So we’re extending the deadline to October 5th. Don’t forget the winner will receive $2000 and a nod on Mashable.

See some of the recent submissions from this week and last week on Mashable and start hacking now.

BOSS Team

Today at Open Hack 2008, we’ll be announcing a new developer challenge we’re hosting with Mashable. Since Yahoo! Search BOSS is all about openness and innovation, we figured the BOSS Mashable Challenge should be too; so there are almost no restrictions on what you can submit. Have an idea for a better way to search on the iPhone? Always wanted a search engine to help you find info on your hobby? Think you could design a better UI than 10 blue links? Now is your chance to build a mashup or prototype, win some cash and show the world your hack. As long as you use a BOSS API and submit it to the Challenge, your idea can win.

The Challenge starts today and the deadline for submission is September 28. Mashable and Yahoo! will then pick the top submission and open it up to Mashable readers for voting. The winner will receive $2000, a nod on Mashable and loads of street (or geek) cred.

Those of you who’ve already built mashups using BOSS are of course eligible as well. Just make sure to submit it to the Challenge. And if you’re coming to Open Hack 2008, don’t forget to stop by the BOSS session at 3:00 this afternoon.

Graham Mudd
BOSS Team