Yahoo! Search BOSS facts for kids
Yahoo Search BOSS (which stood for Build your Own Search Service) was a special project from Yahoo! that let other computer programmers and website owners use Yahoo's powerful search engine technology. It was like giving them the tools to create their own search features on their websites.
Yahoo stopped offering BOSS services like its search tools and hosted search on March 31, 2016. Now, a different system called Yahoo Partner Ads (YPA) has taken its place.
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What Was Yahoo Search BOSS?
Yahoo launched BOSS in July 2008. The main idea was to give developers a way to access Yahoo's huge collection of indexed web pages. Think of the index as a giant library catalog of the internet. Developers could pay a small fee to use this catalog.
How Developers Used BOSS
With BOSS, developers could get search results from Yahoo's index and then use them on their own websites or in their own computer programs. This meant they could make the search results look and work exactly how they wanted for their product. BOSS could send the results in different computer languages like XML, JSON, HTML, or just plain text. It also allowed for advanced search options, like searching only within PDF files.
The way websites were ranked for a search term using BOSS was the same as on the main Yahoo Search website. This was because both used the same big internet catalog and ranking system.
One cool thing about BOSS was that it could be used as a "white label" service. This means websites could use Yahoo's search without showing any Yahoo branding or ads. Yahoo had spent millions of dollars making its search engine really good since the 1990s. By using BOSS, web developers could get high-quality search results without having to build their own search engine from scratch. Later, in 2010, Yahoo said that BOSS would need to include some ads or a fee to keep going.
BOSS Hosted Search Explained
BOSS Hosted Search was a simple way for any website owner to add Yahoo's web search to their site for free. The search part was hosted by Yahoo and appeared in a special box called an "iframe" on the website. This search box looked a lot like the one on search.yahoo.com.
Website owners got a share of the money from ads if someone clicked on a search ad inside the iframe. They could also change how the search box looked. For example, they could add their own logo, remove sidebars, or even use their own search box design. To set up BOSS Hosted Search, website owners just signed up on the Yahoo Search BOSS Portal and copied a small piece of computer code onto their site. Yahoo also provided reports to show how many searches were done through BOSS Hosted Search and how much money was earned.
How Many People Used It?
In 2009, Yahoo announced that about 30 million searches were being done every day through websites that used BOSS technology.
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