OStatic

As we mentioned earlier today, Yahoo! has rolled out Yahoo Search BOSS: the Build your Own Search Service APIs that make much of Yahoo's core content widely available. Though the various offerings involved are not open source, this open content is potentially interesting to open source developers working on the web. Here are some details about what's inside.

Yahoo today announced the beta version of BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service), which essentially turns its core search and other related technologies into a free web service that can be used by anyone who wants to build a search engine. According to Yahoo: Developers, start-ups, and large Internet companies can use BOSS to build and launch web-scale search products that utilize the entire Yahoo! Search index. GigaOm points out that it will allow anyone to rank, arrange and display search results that befit their own algorithm, without as much as acknowledging that the results are coming from Yahoo. Check out more analysis at GigaOm, and an analysis of Yahoo's alpha partners.

You may not have heard of Wikia Search before. A relatively new project from the Wikipedia folks, they've entered the search-engine fray with an attitude that is just about as open as it is possible to be. Not only is their underlying software open source (under BSD licenses), but the very search results themselves are as open to editing as Wikipedia pages.

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced its intention to purchase Yahoo for $44 billion in cash and stock. Now, Yahoo has announced its intention to become a fully open, platformizable company, letting developers mix and match its services and data in new and different ways. How much of this is designed to make Yahoo more profitable, and how much is simply a reaction to Microsoft's acquisition attempt? Will openness bring Yahoo more revenues, or simply make it a cooler company in developers' eyes?