Be BOSSy

september 4, 2008

Yahoo! Search BOSS was released a while back, but I hadn't had time to play with it. Last night, I decided to give it a shot. I had played with the earlier Yahoo! Search API and it was fine, but BOSS is way easier to use. It took me about an hour of fooling around to whip up the basics for mookie's minisearch ("all the goodness of yahoo! search, none of the fat."). Most of that hour was really trying to figure out JSON since I had no idea how to handle JSON output. After some tweaking and getting together an OpenSearch plug-in for Firefox 3 and IE7, my search "engine" actually works pretty well.  Now, I can search straight from Firefox 3's search box, get fast results and have none of those fatty ads. Yahoo! Search BOSS is damned easy to use and I would encourage anyone that is interested to take a look at it.  The one thing that the developer page did not have was a concrete example.  So, if you wish, you can take a look at the code behind mookie's minisearch.  It is probably not the best code, but it will give you an idea how to get started.  Remember, this is skeleton code that really does only a small subset of what Yahoo! Search BOSS is capable of, I encourage you to read the documentation in order to get an idea of what it is truly capable of. Kudos to the Yahoo! Search BOSS team for this release.  Now, the obvious question is: "How is this going to earn Yahoo! money?".


<< back || ultramookie >>