Yahoo! Search BOSS API FAQs

I am a big fan of Yahoo! Search BOSS API as it empowers users to leverage Yahoo's search's crawler and indexes to develop applications without spending a huge amount of money on infrastructure/bandwidth! Google, do you know what I mean?

As an observer on the active Yahoo! Search BOSS API mailing list, I document the Yahoo BOSS API's limitations which I over-hear on the mailing list:

• API fees and Monetization
  • Yahoo is going to charge fees on API usages beyond a certain limit.
  • You can use whatever monetization scheme you want. Apparently, Yahoo can't get its act together to get their own monetization scheme out which BOSS developers would have been very happy to use. Keep in mind that you can't use Google AdSense because AdSense works with content sites, not search.
  • very good discussion here and there.
  • The new fee structure is very likely to force popular non-US or non-Europe BOSS powered sites offline as it's hard to monetize these sites without decent CPM or (CPC+click through rate).
• You can mashup liberally with BOSS API. "are you asking whether you can modify the search results after they are returned to you? if that is essentially your question (i.e. can you show the results any way you want, can you insert other content in between, etc.), then the answer is yes."
• No explicit site exclusion. Yahoo said "We'll provide explicit site restriction functionality in the rest api soon. Stay tuned"
• "Doing hundreds or thousands of restricts is tough to do with a rest api since you're limited by the url length - plus it's not an elegant design. We do offer in the custom track a vertical indexing solution that can scale to millions of sites. We're working on how to make a subset of this platform self serve."
• no support for countries like China, Portugal, Poland. see http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/boss_guide/supp_regions_lang.html
• must have a UI to show search results with Yahoo click URL. Make it not suitable for data mining/analysis cause Yahoo requires you to show their results on UI.
• API doesn't support related search feature as found at yahoo.com's search.
• Click URL contains unique hash, so it's hard for users to see if a site is already visited
• no cached link is sent over the API. The cached link is presented on yahoo.com's search result pages.
• there's no statistics provided to how whether a user clicks Click URLs
• can't specify a date range for web search. It works for news search though.
• cannot do HTML page source-code level search
• search result set's size is limited to 1000
• no inlink support yet
• for image search, there's no way to filter results by license types(eg: creative common license)
• No support for video search yet. You can use the old video search API, or video search RSS feed.

Problems solved:

• API was unstable. Sometimes it takes a long time to respond. There was a DNS problem where Yahoo service, including BOSS API, was in-accessible for a couple of hours.

I will keep updating this page. Please let me know if I miss anything or has outdated info here.

Tags: api search yahoo_boss_api