While some of us may be tired of hearing about the seemingly endless MicroHoo saga, the beleaguered Yahoo! may have just taken a step that could change the web search landscape. Or not. Yahoo! announced that it is extending its OpenStrategy with a new open web services platform called Yahoo! SearchBOSS (Build your Own Search Service). Apparently hoping that the saying "there’s strength in numbers" holds true, Yahoo! is testing whether working with new partners will give it the clout to take some search market share from King of the Search Hill Google. Several partner sites are already working with BOSS, including the semantic search engine hakia and Me.dium, a personalized search startup.

BOSS allows third-party developers to build their own custom search experience susing Yahoo!’s index and results ranking as a base. Then, developers can blend the results with other web data sources, control the presentation, and rerank results without restrictions. With this first release of BOSS, developers can fetch Yahoo!’s search content for Web, News, Image, and Spelling Suggestions. Yahoo! says that other search verticals and data sources are coming soon but declined to disclose what they might be at this point. A company spokesperson says it will make decisions based on feedback from the beta.

So how is BOSS different from other search APIs out there, such as Google’s or Microsoft’s? Yahoo!’s FAQ says that "for the first time developers can tap into our search infrastructure and build applications for commercial use without restrictions around presentation or ordering of results. You can take BOSS results, blend in your own secret sauce, and build a search engine of your own design, all without required brand attribution."

BOSS also permits unlimited queries per day.(Results are delivered in groups of 50 at a time.) More information and a side-by-side chart comparison of BOSS and the previously available Yahoo! Search API are available at http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss.

A company spokesperson says that Yahoo! will still offer SearchMonkey.Yahoo!’s SearchMonkey developer platform was a first phase of theYahoo! open strategy, giving site owners and developers control over the appearance of Yahoo! Search results. BOSS is designed to take Yahoo!’s open strategy to the next level by providing Yahoo! Search infrastructure and technology to developers and companies to help them build their own search experiences.

The BOSS service is currently ad free but not for long. The Yahoo! FAQ says, "It will be arequirement to host our ads on your site. We’re building this technology into our platform and it is coming soon. Yahoo! Search will share the revenue produced through these ads with developers. In the meantime, the API is open for free use without ads."

BOSS is available in several options. The self-service API and the mashup framework tools allow developers to quickly get started in creating new web search experiences. The BOSS Custom service will be offered to select partners with large-scale needs in building and supporting websearch experiences. It is currently an invite-only program. Pricing will be determined on a case-by-case basis.

Yahoo! has also partnered with the computer science departments of some top universities to allow researchers to conduct open research on search engines. Yahoo! is currently working with Carnegie Mellon University; Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay; Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology (MIT); Purdue University; Stanford University; University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign; and the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMASS).

Vik Singh, part of Yahoo!’s Open Search team, wrote on his personal blog (http://zooie.wordpress.com/2008/07/10/yahoo-boss-an-insider-view),"Several months ago I pitched this idea to the executives on how Yahoo! can specifically open up its search assets to fragment the market. It’s remarkable to finally see some of the vision (with the help of many talented people) reach the public today." He shed some insid  er’s insight on the possibilities of using BOSS. "In my online experience, I typically visit a variety of sites: Techmeme, Digg, Techcrunch, eBay, Amazon, del.icio.us, etc. … The biggest goal of Boss is to help bootstrap sites like these to get comprehensiveness and basic rankingfor free, as well as offer tools to re-rank, blend, and overlay the results in a way that revolutionizes the search experience." He also pointed to the future possibilities: "The next couple of milestones for Boss I think are even more interesting and disruptive - server side services, monetization, blending ranking models, more features exposure, query classifiers … so stay tuned."

Possibilities for Niche and Vertical Search

Yahoo!’s senior director of the Open Search Platform, Bill Michels, told Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb that niche search engines often aren’t very good because they have access to a very limited index of content (www.readwriteweb.com/archives/yahoo_opens_its_search_engine.php). It’s expensive to index the whole web. Likewise, Michels said that there are a substantial number of large organizations that have a huge amount of content but don’t have world-class search technology.

In both cases, Yahoo! BOSS is intended to level the playing field and "blow the Big 3 wide open." Says Kirkpatrick: "We agree that it’s veryexciting to imagine thousands of new Yahoo! powered niche search engines proliferating. Could Yahoo! plus the respective strengths and communities of all these new players challenge Google?  We think they could."

Yahoo! thinks so too. "Today, the search market is generally limited to three major search engines to drive innovation and growth," said Prabhakar Raghavan, chief strategist for Yahoo! Search."BOSS opens up the playing field for developers and companies to disrupt the search market, become principals in search, and build new Web search experiences that offer more choice for users."

Current Partners

The BOSS site links to four current partner sites as examples of implementations. These include the following: 

• Hakia (www.hakia.com), a semantic search engine, uses Yahoo! Search BOSS to accelerate its semantic analysis of the web by accessing Yahoo! index’s vast amounts of web documents. 
• Me.dium (http://me.dium.com/search) combined the BOSS API with its insight into the real-time surfing activity of the crowds to build a "crowd-powered" social search engine prototype. 
• Daylife To-Go (www.daylife.com/page/yahoosearchondaylife) is a new self-service, hosted publishing platform from Daylife. Anyone can use it to automatically generate customizable pages and widgets. Daylife To-Go uses the BOSS API platform to power its web search module. 
• Cluuz (www.cluuz.com) generates easier to understand search results through patent pending semantic cluster graphs, image extraction, and tag clouds. The Cluuz analysis is performed in real time on results returned from BOSS API.

Searchexpert Chris Sherman, writing at SearchEngineLand, says "Me.dium has introduced a social search engine that blends results from a ‘realtime’ index of what people are currently viewing online with Yahoo’s full-scale web index. The result is something I’ve not seen elsewhere—and despite my long time skepticism regarding social search, this approach actually holds promise for delivering a unique view of relevant content on the web."

Riza Berkan, Ph.D., CEO of hakia, says, "Accessing Yahoo!’s resources via Yahoo! Search BOSS geometrically increases our ability to QDEX the entire World Wide Web and usher in the next evolution of search—semantic, or natural language search. BOSS is a great testament to Yahoo!’s foresight, strategic thinking and leadership, and illustrates the growing need for new technologies that will improve the user experience and overall search capabilities."

TechCrunch says that it has been enlisted to participate (www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/09/yahoo-radically-opens-web-search-with-boss)."We’re working on a search implementation that will enable readers to conduct searches across the entire network and retrieve results that have been weighted using a custom relevance model. Readers will also be able to drill down by author, comments, date, and other criteria."

Reactions From the Experts

Reactions to Yahoo!’s BOSS have been quite mixed, with some seeing potential disruption in the market as Yahoo! marshals a group of smaller niche and vertical search engines to nibble away at Google. Others, like blogger Om Malik (http://gigaom.com/2008/07/09/yahoo-boss-web-service), see further risk to Yahoo!’s own search business. However, Malik says,"But I think it’s a risk worth taking, for it will shake up the search status quo and offer a way in for the little guys and all their creativity."

Erik Arnold, who builds custom products supported by Google APIs, says, "Building application on top of search is something that I do see happening more and more. People want to make search results more social, and have more vertical applications." He thinks it could also force Google to drop its Site Search pricing. "This is a catch-up from Yahoo, but it is also free. I actually hope that it takes off, and Google lowers their Site Search restrictions. It is hard to do a large scale app with the current pricing. As part of Google’s advantage is their ability to scale, I will also be interested to see if this search application [from Yahoo!] can handle success."

Mark Hendrickson, writing at TechCrunch says, "When you’re the distant second player in web search, you’ve got nothing to lose by making bold moves. So it makes sense that Yahoo has adopted an open strategy with the following idea in mind: woo developers to build on top of your technology, and then display your advertisements to more eyeballs throughout the long tail of the web."

Vanessa Fox, writing at SearchEngineLand (http://searchengineland.com/080710-000100.php), says "Overall, this is an interesting idea from Yahoo! Can it shake up the status quo market share? I’m not so sure about that. But it is another sign of Yahoo!’s commitment to the developer community and of their willingness to think creatively about market share (although they may be thinking more about ways to find distribution channels beyond toolbar deals than they are about helping competing search engines be successful)."

IDC’s Susan Feldman saw more potential for the disruptive possibilities of Yahoo’s BOSS. She says, "IDC’s digital marketplace research has demonstrated that a strong affiliate network will, in the long run, save the major search engines from stagnation. More queries are already going to the specialized Web locations than are going through the major search engines. Helping the long tail of Web sites build their businesses and their advertising revenue streams will also increase the reach and the revenue for Yahoo! Paying attention to building that affiliate network could well change the balance of power in Web search. Yahoo!, by giving these tools to site owners, ties them more strongly to the Yahoo! ecosystem."

Clearly,Yahoo! has some challenges ahead, but with this bold move in pushing its Open Strategy, it is clearly making a strong statement about which companies it wants as partners. But time will tell if this is a wise strategy. In his blog Beyond Search (http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/2008/07/10/hakia-to-accelerate-semantic-analysis-of-the-web), search expert Stephen E. Arnold points to Yahoo!’s current state of"disarray." He says "Any announcement, therefore, may be moving deck chairs on the Titanic. I will take a more skeptical position and say, ‘Let’s see how this plays out.’"

Cuil (pronounced COOL), a technology company, launched its search offering, which combines a web index with content-based relevance methods, results organized by ideas, and complete user privacy. Cuil has indexed 120 billion web pages and provides organized and relevant results based on web page content analysis. It organizes similar search results into groups and sorts them by category. Cuil gives users a display of results and offers organizing features, such as tabs to clarify subjects, images to identify topics, and search refining suggestions to help guide users to the results they seek. Cuil’s features include: a magazine-style layout that separates results by subject and allows further search by concept or category, results ranked by the content on each page, and privacy protection.

(www.cuil.com)

LexisNexis Applied Discovery, a provider of electronic discovery solutions, has announced the latest version of its e-discovery platform, used by corporations and law firms to review data for complex discovery matters. The enhanced Applied Discovery Online Review Application (ORA) offers advancements for planning and monitoring large review projects, including improvements to workflow, batching and search performance. In addition to the ORA upgrade, Applied Discovery also improves processing capacity, turnaround times, and security as a result of an investment of more than $10 million dollars over the last 12 months in a hosting center upgrade.

The ORA enhancements improve total system performance and speed up reviews, making it ideal for large review teams due to the ease it brings to planning, executing and monitoring an efficient review. Highlights include: An Advanced Review Management (ARM) system, providing targeted capabilities to review supervisors to help streamline review workflow; New ARM tools to define review project stages and objectives, including the ability to assign access to document batches based on user profiles; Intuitive monitoring dashboards and reporting to improve visibility; ORA search performance time saving enhancements, that provide up to a 50% improvement in simple searches and up to 90% for complex searches - compared to the current Applied Discovery ORA, already recognized for fast performance; Enhanced security to help reduce the risk of multi-site, multi-party review; Expansion to greater than 1000 Terabytes of data storage to support the largest cases; and faster grid processing capacity to increase document processing turnaround time.

(www.applieddiscovery.com, www.lexisnexis.com, www.reedelsevier.com)

ExtraMind Systems announced the release of Instant Navigator 0.7, a plug-in for Microsoft OneNote. Instant Navigator enhances OneNote with a "quick-as-you-type" search, which lets users find a note by its title. If a word you're searching for is contained in the title of a notebook or a section, OneNote includes the title into the general search results, making it impossible to navigate to the needed page quickly. Instant Navigator filters out all irrelevant. Instant Navigator can run from anywhere in Windows.

(www.instant-navigator.com)

Really Strategies and Temis have announced a technology partnership that will combine RSuite with Temis' Luxid for content management and automated semantic annotation and categorization services.

ReallyStrategies explains RSuite is a content management system built on top of a native XML repository that also manages non-XML content, including PDF, InDesign/InCopy, jpg, Word and audio files. Along with core CMS features and functionalities (such as check in/out, version control, Web-based accessibility, etc.), RSuite also offers drag-and-drop workflow administration tools, automated action handlers, customizable user interface and metadata management at the element level.

Luxid is a leading content enrichment and discovery platform for publishing companies that identifies, annotates and extracts semantic entities and relationships to help companies turn both legacy and new digital assets into new information products.

EMC Documentum has announced Version 6.5 of its enterprise content management suite, which, the company says, combines risk-free Enterprise 2.0 capabilities with robust enterprise content management.

EMC explains that Documentum Version 6.5 includes new features designed to deliver a rich Web 2.0 user experience and enhanced XML capabilities, while providing improved enterprise performance and scalability, federated records management as well as accelerated transactional business processes. It adds that customers will be able to leverage the appeal of newer technologies for users, improve the existing content applications already in use, and power all of these with a more scalable and secure ECM platform than ever before available.

EMC Documentum reports that key products in Version 6.5 providing a the Web 2.0 experience include:

• CenterStage Essentials, a new client for knowledge workers being released as a free online beta and featuring an easy-to-use interface along with shared team workspaces, guided search and simple Documentum access.
• Media WorkSpace, a new rich media interface that provides users a personalized, dynamic and familiar way to view, find, compare, annotate, review and share rich media assets.
• My Documentum, a new lightweight client that is completely integrated with the desktop providing users with immediate access to the latest versions of content they use most often, as well as allowing them to access and work on documents when they are not connected to the server.
• Web Publisher Page Builder, a newly designed, Flex-based Web authoring interface provides non-technical business users/authors with interactive and easy-to-use tools to create compelling Web experiences.
• TaskSpace, a highly configurable, all-in-one user "experience" that combines content, process, high-fidelity forms and monitoring to accelerate business processes and substantially increase user productivity.

Interwoven, Inc., provider of content management solutions, announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Discovery Mining, Inc., an eDiscovery provider to professional services firms and corporations. Discovery Mining streamlines the discovery phase of litigation and investigations with a software-as-a-service solution for processing, reviewing, and producing electronic data. Under the terms of the agreement between Discovery Mining and Interwoven, Interwoven will pay approximately $36 million in cash for all outstanding shares of Discovery Mining and vested stock options, and assume certain existing employee stock options.

(www.interwoven.com)

An online travel company has enhanced its Web site with technology from Baynote. Expedia is using Baynote Social Search to supplement its existing travel booking engine, enabling it to refine results based on what searchers have found useful and interesting in the past.

"The technology is a great fit for Expedia because the collective input from our millions of monthly visitors constantly improves the relevance of the search results," says Tom Taylor, director of strategy for Expedia.

Taylor continues, "The Baynote solution is able to deliver the most relevant results based on what other Expedia customers have previously found most useful for similar queries."

According to a news release from Baynote, travelers who are browsing Expedia for information on specific types of trips, such as golf or beach vacations, can find a new search box in the upper right-hand corner of the site, which enables them to enter countless travel-related search terms. For example, one person could search for something specific, such as San Diego beachfront hotels, while another might enter a more general query, such as beach vacations. Although the queries are different, the customers may actually be looking for the same thing.

TheBrain Technologies, developer of sophisticated mind mapping software, has announced its newest release, PersonalBrain 4.5, a complimentary upgrade for all PersonalBrain 4.0 users. PersonalBrain 4.5 helps people mind map their "thoughts," ideas and information with new visualization, searching and editing features. Further, a new, robust and more powerful database backend sets no limits to the number of "thoughts" and files that can be connected and accessed.

The company reports that additional new features include:

• increased performance--all operations are now faster, from loading to creating information, and navigation is up to 30 times faster;
• advanced search and indexing--Version 4.5 includes powerful search that lets users shift focus to anything that comes to mind in seconds;
• improved distant thought view--the software's display engine makes it a powerful visualization tool for concept and mind mapping;
• merging Brains and copying thoughts--users can now easily merge the contents of one Brain into another and use sophisticated copying functions to leverage a set of thoughts and relationships in different contexts;
• Excel and Word relationship import--information structures from Word, Excel and other applications can now be imported into PersonalBrain; and
• complete undo and redo editing--PersonalBrain’s drag-and-relate technology lets users create and link numerous ideas and thoughts in seconds, and if a change is made and then reconsidered, the multiple-level undo buffer makes going back a one-step process.

Attivio has released the latest version of its unified information access and analysis platform, Active Intelligence Engine (AIE) Version 1.2, which is now available to direct customers. AIE Version 1.2 combines business intelligence and enterprise search capabilities to integrate structured data and unstructured content into a single index.

The company explains that significant features and benefits of Attivio AIE Version 1.2 include:

Query-side JOIN. AIE indexes content from databases, Web pages, office documents, e-mail, media files and most other enterprise repositories and applications. Relationships in data are maintained or discovered, and can be fully exploited.

High performance and scalability. Version 1.2 is designed to offer linear, modular scale on commodity. It can be installed and configured on one or more servers; more can be added seamlessly as data and query volume increase or performance requirements change over time. Customers are given the freedom to buy only the hardware they need without risk of costly upgrades in the future that entail a lengthy re-indexing and inevitable downtime.

Fast time to value. Customers can be up and running in just a few hours instead of weeks and months, allowing them to spend more time building their own applications and solutions and less on the integration and administration of Attivio AIE.

Real-time processing with alerting. Version 1.2 supports real-time, incremental indexing so fresh data is continuously streamed into the system and made immediately available for querying.

For more information, click here.