The Next Web

Yahoo proves to be a pioneer by opening up search platform

Written on July 10, 2008 – 1:14 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Yahoo is a pioneer of the Web 2.0 giants. In an industry where blogs, organizations, press, and companies just talk about the possibilities and the urge of opening up - Yahoo is the only major Internet company that really experiments with these new standards. Whereas dozens of companies take small symbolical steps, Yahoo just talks in terms of leaps. After embracing OpenID, the Sunnyvale-based company now opens up its search platform to third parties with the launch of BOSS (Build your Own Search Service).

How to get back at Google

Although they state their goal is to “foster innovation in the search landscape“, we all know it’s a daring strategy to win back some terrain on Google. The big G has over 68 percent of the search market and is often called THE leader in search. Somehow, they keep on strengthening this position and it seems like they’ll never give this no. 1 position away. The Yahoo executives have realized this, and now take a different road to search success. I can’t say it better than Marshall Kirckpatrick from ReadWriteWeb, who stated that Yahoo “attacks Google with an army of verticals” - referring to the vertical search engines who will use the index of Yahoo to offer specified results for niches.

The revenge of the alts

These vertical engines now suffer from a lack of indexed sites - as it’s nearly impossible to create an index of the relevant parts of whole web. Yahoo has accomplished this, and now makes it possible for these alternative search engines to focus on the product, not the technology. As Yahoo will offer the folllowing features:

Ability to re-rank and blend results – BOSS partners can re-rank search results as they see fit and blend Yahoo!’s results with proprietary and other web content in a single search experience
Total flexibility on presentation – Freedom to present search results using any user interface paradigm, without Yahoo! branding or attribution requirements
BOSS Mashup Framework — We’re releasing a Python library and UI templates that allow developers to easily mashup BOSS search results with other public data sources
Web, news and image search — At launch, developers will have access to web, news and image search and we’ll be adding more verticals soon
Unlimited queries — There are no rate limits on the number of queries per day

With this, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales sees the prediction he told me in January becoming reality: “Good quality search is becoming a commodity item. The search quality of Google, Yahoo and Ask are actually very similar. So the idea that Google is some kind of technological powerhouse, is actually not longer true.”

See some examples of BOSS at Hakia and Me.dium.

I hope you like that post!

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alternative search, boss, google, open standards, yahoo

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The REAL competition to Search Engines?

Written on April 22, 2008 – 7:52 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,

One of the theories discussed at the Alt Search Engines meeting was that the competition for Search Engines might not just be in different, faster or better search engines but in alternative ways of finding information.

The AllTh.at team

One example is Smart Agents like AllTh.at and Google Alerts. Lots of people use Google Alerts to keep them up-to-date of new information. AllTh.at saves your searches and keeps looking for new results and notifies you via email or RSS. Previously users might have used search engines to find new information. Now there is a continuously updating search query active in the background that notifies us of new results.

Services such as Symbaloo and Netvibes make it easier to manage lots of information. This makes it easier to browse the web and find stuff. For a lot of people Google is THE portal to the web. They don’t use bookmarks or even URLs but simply open a browser, wait for Google to appear and type in what they need. As portal services (like Symbaloo) gain traction people will be less inclined to use Google to navigate the web.

What are the alternatives to Google?

A third example are the vertical search engines. You can use Google to search for words but it is more logical to use a dedicated dictionary search engine like Answers.com and a car search engine like UsedCars.com. The vertical search engines are becoming more popular every day and more verticals appear left and right.

Can you think of more ways to get to information without using Google? WikiPedia is a good alternative to Google is you are looking for specific information. What other alternatives are there?

allth.at, alternative search, altsearchengines, google, portal, san francisco, Symbaloo

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