2. BOSS … What ?
• BOSS = Build your Own Search Service
• Open Yahoo’s core search features via web services
to let 3rd parties revolutionize Search
• Monetization - Ads Service : 3rd parties revenue
share
• Pay per use model. Don’t worry will give you free
access for hacking
“BOSS is a data API. It’s not a search API”
- Vik Singh, BOSS Architect
3. BOSS Details
• REST based API.
• XML or JSON output
• Web, News, Image, SiteSearch, and Spelling
Suggestion services
• Time span filtering for News Search
• Image attributes like height, width, etc
• Document type filtering
• Delicious Tags and Popularity
• Keyterm extraction
• Microformat and RDF data
• Extended abstracts
• Complex query combinations and filters
• Search for data in different markets
• Recognizes most search filters from Yahoo! and
Google (backdoor hacks)
4. BOSS … Authentication ?
• OAUTH 1.0
• HTTP headers or GET params
• Self-serve sample code available
– PHP: http://oauth.net/code
– Perl: http://search.cpan.org/dist/Net-OAuth/
– Ruby: https://gist.github.com/383159
– C#:
http://oauth.googlecode.com/svn/code/csharp/OAuth
Base.cs
– Java: http://code.google.com/p/oauth-signpost/
5. Boss APIs … Data Request ?
http://yboss.yahooapis.com/ysearch/{service,*}?q
={keywords}
http://yboss.yahooapis.com/ysearch/{service,*}ser
vice1.q={keywords}&service2.q={keywords}
Arguments: service, q, start, count, market, format, callback, sites
Operators: And, Or, +(Include), -(Exclude)
6. What can I Hack ?
• Some Useful Data Sources to mashup:
Y! Answers, Twitter, Youtube, Wolfram Alpha, Delicious,
Flickr, Facebook, Wikipedia, Foursquare, Open Data,
IMDB, Amazon, Netflix, Craigslist, TheInfo.org
and more…
