The newly launched Yahoo! Content Analysis service replaces Yahoo!’s popular Term Extraction service and now provides advanced content analysis on either text or a URL, leverages Yahoo!’s state of the art machine-learned ranking (MLR) technology to extract key terms from the content, and, more importantly, to rank them based on their overall importance to the content. The output you receive contains the keywords and their ranks along with other actionable metadata.

On top of entity extraction and ranking, developers need to know whether key terms correspond to objects with existing rich metadata. Having this entity/object connection allows for the creation of highly engaging user experiences. The Y! Content Analysis output provides related Wikipedia IDs for key terms when they can be confidently identified. This enables interoperability with linked data on the semantic Web.

Finally, sometimes you’re interested in the whole document in addition to its key terms. We provide classification for your content as well. We’ll map your content or URL to our deep and descriptive taxonomy.

Y! Content Analysis supports US English and Chinese languages for entity detection and ranking. Classification supports only English and more languages will be added gradually.

Our new service replaces the current Term Extraction Service, which is expected to end on March 31, 2012. We will continue to support the Term Extraction requests, but calls must be directed to our YQL table since we’ll be shutting down the non-YQL service. More details can be found on today’s YDN blog post.

The new features and MLR are supported only in the new request format. Give it a try today!

– Peter Levinson, Product Manager, Yahoo! Content Analysis

When launched, Yahoo! Search BOSS, offered developers a search API with the power, simplicity, and flexibility demanded by the marketplace. Yahoo!’s BOSS API currently enables thousands of customers with “Search as a Service,” used in a wide variety of online applications. The BOSS API was just the beginning.

Today, we are announcing a new home for Yahoo! Search BOSS, boss.yahoo.com, and three new BOSS offerings: BOSS Hosted Search, BOSS Site Search and BOSS Shortcuts. The new offerings address user engagement, traffic recirculation, monetization, and high development and maintenance costs.

Whether you’re a site owner looking for a robust customizable search solution, a developer that needs the utmost flexibility for search as a service, or a publisher that needs quality solutions that deliver higher user engagement, boss.yahoo.com has it all.

BOSS Hosted Search, available globally today, offers a free-of-charge web search experience, highly customizable right out of the box. In minutes, you can configure a web search experience much like the Yahoo! Search page with structured content, search refiners, image modules and other rich assets. Simply pick the bells and whistles that meet the look and feel you desire, insert the generated code snippet into your page and you are done. It is Search built your way and offers opportunity to apply for revenue sharing through search advertising.

BOSS Site Search. The concept of Site Search has been around for many years, but the products available in the marketplace leave a lot to be desired. Publishers deserve a solution that is more focused on the content of their site, that delivers results that are highly relevant and fresh, that offers rich customizations, and that can be deployed with ease.

Available globally today through our Private Alpha program, BOSS Site Search provides a hosted site search solution that delivers results that are highly relevant and fresh. This enables you to keep your users more engaged with your content and stay longer on your site.

BOSS Shortcuts.  Search is more than just the perfect display of meaningful results based on user keywords. It’s also about recommending related content based on the context of what a user is reading on a publisher site. Existing solutions are often over-commercialized, deliver poor results and drive users away.

Available today through our Private Alpha program for the US, Canada, India, and UK markets, BOSS Shortcuts delivers technology that understands the content to help analyze your article pages and find terms that engage with your audience. When users click on these terms a contextual window is presented filled with highly relevant results from your site, the web, and our ad marketplace.

New Yahoo! Search BOSS API Updates

In addition to the new BOSS products, we are pleased to unveil new updates for the Yahoo! Search BOSS API:

·      Making Ads Simpler and Easier – Today, we are making the process of signing up for Yahoo! Ads and getting access to them easier. After completing a simple application form, start getting access to ads and monetizing offerings within a few days. And best of all, both ads and search results continue to be from the same service, and developers get one simple statement at the end of the month. Learn more from the documentation and in the FAQ.

·      New Markets — This morning we added more than 10 new markets for which we now serve search results. Flemish you say, well we got it covered. See a full list for all the various services.

It has been a momentous year for Yahoo! Search BOSS, from the launch of BOSS v2 in April, continued addition of new features, and today’s news of the new BOSS Portal and additional API updates.

Please keep a watch out on the Yahoo! Search blog and on the BOSS API Yahoo! group for  many more interesting additions coming your way for 2012.

– Ashim Chhabra and the Yahoo! Search BOSS team: Nagesh Pobbathi, Varun Aggarwal, Rahul Hampole, Himanshu Bafna, Srinivas Deeduvanu, Gloria Chien, and Eshwar Rao

In an August 2010 blog post, we said we would continue Site Explorer with a focus on new features for webmaster community, even after the transition to Microsoft platforms is complete. We listened to your feedback, and along with the team from Bing Webmaster Center looked jointly at the roadmap for the webmaster tools. Having two webmaster portals for a single source for organic results does not add enough value.  Once organic results are transitioned to Bing in all the markets, we plan to shut down Yahoo! Site Explorer and Microsoft’s Webmaster Tools will be the source for Bing and Yahoo! webmaster site and analytics data.

The Bing Webmaster Center team has been actively adding new features over the past few months, including detailed traffic statistics and a new inbound links feature. Microsoft is also committed to build analytic reports that include Yahoo! search usage. Further details on these reports will be coming soon. You might have some questions that we will try to answer below:

When will Site Explorer shutdown?

We are working with Microsoft to transition organic results in all markets to the Microsoft Search platform. Site Explorer will shut down once all markets are transitioned. This is expected later this year. We will keep updating you with progress of the transition at our Search Blog.

Should I start using Bing Webmaster Center?

Yes, webmasters should start using Bing Webmaster Center.

Does that mean that I should stop using Site Explorer?

No. In a large part of the world, we have not yet transitioned to Microsoft search platform. Hence, it is important that Yahoo! continues to receive your site/sitemap submissions so that search results from Yahoo! are fresh and relevant for markets that have not switched over. In order to continue to receive relevant organic traffic from Yahoo! search results, we encourage you to continue using Site Explorer as you have in the past until we fully switch over to Microsoft search platform for organic results.

Does it mean that I don’t have to optimize for Yahoo! and Bing Search engines separately in the future?

That is correct. We anticipate that later this year, Yahoo!’s organic results will be powered by Microsoft’s search platform in all parts of the world. After that point, any optimization that you do on Bing Webmaster Center tool will be reflected in Yahoo! organic search results.

Will the Site Explorer APIs be shut down?

The APIs were scheduled to be shut down at the end of last year, but the timeframe has been extended for the YDN Site Explorer API up until September 15, 2011.

Note: For BOSS Site Explorer APIs shut down information, scheduled for July 20, 2011, please see this April 2011 blog post.

Will Yahoo! continue to crawl my website?

Although the organic results will be powered by Microsoft Search platforms, Yahoo! will continue to innovate on the search experience beyond the services delivered by Microsoft. In order to provide Yahoo! users with an amazing search experience, our slurp crawlers may continue to selectively crawl websites to help support these efforts.

Hemant Minocha, Product Manager,Yahoo! Site Explorer

Control your daily usage limits

Many BOSS developers told us they wanted to be able to control their daily usage. Starting next wek, developers can specify a daily dollar limit for your service consumption. Of course, you can change that limit at any time and can make any combination of queries before hitting that limit. Learn more here on how to set this up. You truly control your own service.

HTTPS support for even more security

Even though we are the only Search API using oAuth, we decided to go one step further. We now allow you to use all the goodness of BOSS with HTTPS. You get all the same functionality that you have with BOSS V2 but you can affix a HTTPS to ensure additional peace of mind. Your search with even more security.

BOSS + SQL, BOSS + YQL

We know that a number of BOSS developers are more familiar with SQL and YQL. We have hence upgraded our BOSS mashup to work with V2, which allows for SQL type querying for the service. As shown in this example about 15 lines of code, you can put together a complete News module. You can also use a user created YQL table with BOSS V2. Download sample mashup code or start using YQL.  Your search made relational.

More BOSS news

We added more functionality to the BOSS news service. You can now search for specific headlines, news from a specific location and by specific language. All this powered by the great news content that is indexed by Yahoo! News. Your news, with even more control. 

Upgrades in the documentation

We have the best user community in the Search world and we listened to you. In addition to previous examples in PHP, we added code examples in Perl, Python, Ruby, Java and C# to make your jump to BOSS as painless as possible. We noticed the common pitfalls users faced and made sure to provide useful pointers where needed. Check out the documentation and start running with BOSS. Your documents, written your way.

What’s next?

We are truly only scratching the surface of what Y! Search BOSS can offer you. We’re working on delivering a new feature related to blog search. Stay in touch, we’ll share more details in posts to come.  

Also as we had announced back in April, we are shutting down BOSS v1 on July 20, 2011, so make sure you transition your applications. If you have any questions reach out to us on the BOSS Yahoo! Group – we are always waiting to help. 

– Rahul Hampole and your BOSS Team

How does Yahoo! Search BOSS appeal to a developer like you (both on the product side and the business side)?

GW: On the product side, it enables a developer to deliver a fully functioning general-purpose search engine to a consumer, which is pretty amazing if you think about it. As such, it really opens up the possibility to innovate in search.

On the business side, the pricing structure enables you to find a profitable niche. Third-party advertising is allowed, and you can also use the Yahoo! Search ads, which should cover costs.

For more of the Q&A, check out the YDN blog interview.

As we announced in October 2010, we are getting ready to launch a new version of Yahoo! Search BOSS in the coming months and will be closing the current version this summer. We are now pleased to provide further details to help developers prepare for the transition, and are planning to provide specific technical documentation by March 1^st 2011, prior to releasing the new BOSS.

The new BOSS service will enable “Search in the Cloud,” serving a robust set of web, image and news search results. A more limited web results service with a lower price point will also be available for developers who can utilize a subset of BOSS content to meet their application requirements. BOSS V2 will provide a self-serve sign up mechanism through the Yahoo! Developer Network, where developers will be able to enter their payment information and request advertising through the combined Yahoo! and Microsoft marketplace.

Pricing

The following pricing chart reflects the fee structure we expect to offer at launch:

Each query will return a predetermined number of results.  Developers will be charged for queries received by Yahoo! based on the applicable price for query type, and be billed on a monthly basis, or more frequently, depending on a developer’s query volume. Developers will also be allowed a fixed number of free queries before their usage is charged.

Search Advertising

We encourage BOSS developers to use Yahoo! Search advertising to build a sustainable business for their applications, and those qualifying for Yahoo! Search advertising will be served ads in their BOSS API calls. Through the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance, we believe we have a robust marketplace and search advertising platform that will meet customers’ needs. In addition, we encourage developers to experiment with other advertising formats such as display. (And, don’t forget that Yahoo!, as the leader in online display advertising, can help. Click here for more details on Yahoo’s display advertising products.)

Branding

With the new version, we will be publishing Yahoo! branding guidelines for BOSS and will require all applications to include recognition of the Yahoo! brand.  We want you to be able to leverage the Yahoo! brand to help signify the valuable platform on which your applications are built.

Philosophy

BOSS has always been and will be about developers. Our goal is to provide a product that allows you to build sustainable businesses via interesting cloud based search technology at a fair cost. In addition, we encourage BOSS developers to monetize your products using Yahoo! Search advertising – this will enable a long-term, symbiotic relationship between developers, consumers and Yahoo! Our pricing scheme is designed to reflect our belief in this ecosystem.

Once again, we are excited to bring developers our next version of BOSS very soon, and we are always looking to hear from you about new and interesting ways you want to use BOSS. Keep a watch out on the BOSS group for more updates.

Rahul Hampole

Yahoo! Search BOSS Team

The format of VoCamp was conceived by Talis’ Tom Heath and Yahoo!’s Peter Mika, with the first installment organized in Oxford, England, in September, 2008. Since then, VoCamps have grown into a real movement, with events organized in Galway, Ireland; Austin, Texas.; Ibiza, Spain; and Washington, D.C., with more planned in New York and Bristol, England.

In Sunnyvale, we spent the first afternoon discussing three broad issues: ways of finding vocabularies on the Semantic Web, tools for mapping vocabularies and executing data transformations, and methods for lifting relational databases into the RDF world. Over pastries and pizza the next day, the campers worked in small groups on more specialized topics, including creating methodologies for vocabulary development, and developing a microformat for code documentation. (Many thanks to the microformat admins Tantek Çelik, Kevin Marks, and Ben Ward for bringing their perspectives to this discussion.) Other topics discussed included the Common Tag format and vocabulary visualization.

As Yahoo! Search moves toward a Web of Objects, we know that the developer community will be a critical component for creating a more robust Semantic Web. We were proud to play host to VoCamp Sunnyvale and look forward to future VoCamp gatherings.

Yahoo! Search

With Yahoo! Search Web Services you can write programs using data from Local Search, News Search, Video Search and Web Search, among others. Our search APIs offer generous rate limits and are based on the REST specification. REST is relatively easy to get up to speed on and to use, no SOAP programming required.

Also, with our Site Explorer APIs, you can keep tabs on traffic and usage by querying for the pages in the Yahoo! index and the sites linking into a site. Additionally, we’ve recently added updateNotification, which you can use to update us of changes to your site.

If you have any questions or comments about our search APIs, please leave us a comment below, or better, suggest them at our Suggestion Board!

Amit Kumar
Yahoo! Search