Related News
Vote Now - Make Your Voice Heard!
Voting is a critical element of your responsibility as a developer or tech enthusiast. Making your voice heard can help shape the future of the web. It's also fun to share your opinion on what the candidates have to offer.

Oh, you thought we were talking about the General Election? Nope. While we agree that it's admittedly more important to vote in that election, we're referring to the BOSS Mashable Challenge - and the candidates, well they're 10 really innovative mashups built using Yahoo! Search BOSS.So check out Mashable's latest post, kick the tires on the 10 finalists and make your voice heard before the deadline - this Sunday at midnight. There have already been 4,000 votes, so be sure to add yours.The BOSS Team
And the Winner Is…

Last week, the finalists of the BOSS Mashable Challenge were announced and readers had a chance to vote for their favorites. Mashable has now announced the lucky winners. But first, here's a reminder of the finalists: TuneChimp - Music search socialmention - People/social networking search CopyrightSpot - Original content search KallOut - Selection-based search PopGist - Discussion/topic aggregation Surf Canyon - Real-time results re-ranking Tall Street - Web search using community voting iMusicMash - Social music app for iPhone Our favorite aspect of the Challenge was seeing such a wide variety of mashups. Developers submitted apps built on a bunch of platforms - OS, browser, web and iPhone. And while a lot of the mashups focused on tweaking the current web search paradigm, many were highly specialized (such as CopyrightSpot) or vertically focused (e.g. PlayerSearch). A handful of apps even focused on new ranking algorithms (e.g. Surf Canyon).Drumroll please...After 5 days of voting and thousands of votes, the community has spoken. We're happy to announce that KallOut is the first prize winner and socialmention takes the runner-up prize. Mashable will be profiling KallOut and its developer soon, so keep your eyes peeled for a post.


We'd like to thank Mashable and all the developers who participated in the challenge. Congratulations to KallOut and socialmention!The BOSS Team
What’s Being Built with BOSS
It's been about a month since Yahoo! Search BOSS launched, so it seems like an opportune time to look at some of the mashups and search products that have been built using the BOSS APIs & services. As we've said before, our goal with BOSS is to remove as many of the barriers as possible to creating new search products. By providing deep access to Yahoo! Search's investment in engineering, sciences and core search infrastructure and removing key usage restrictions, we are encouraging a whole new level of innovation in search experiences. We are very excited to see the diversity in products that many of you have already created. What follows is just a small sample of what's being built -- we'll post again soon with a bunch more. 4HourSearch -- Built by Sam Pullara, 4HourSearch is a demonstration of the power of Yahoo! Search BOSS combined with a slick user interface. Aptly named, it took Sam four hours to build the site using a combination of the BOSS API and YUI design tools.

PlayerSearch -- Ted Kasten and team are building a sports search engine that pulls in content from a host of sources, including BOSS. Fantasy sports fanatics, check it out here.

NewsLine -- As part of the Daylife Developer Challenge, the folks from Dipity built a mashup using their timeline API, Daylife's news API and the BOSS API. The result is a really interesting way to visualize news for any topic. Congrats to the Dipity team on winning the BOSS mashup prize!

Tianamo -- Tianamo is a 3D search visualization early prototype built by Lachlan James. It maps the relationships between the search results from the BOSS API and displays them visually. To check it out, you'll need to be running Windows with Java 1.6+.

As you can see, the possibilities for creativity and innovation in search are almost endless. If you're building a mashup or product using BOSS, make sure to tag it with "bossmashup" on Delicious so we and the rest of the world can discover it.The BOSS team
Return of the Hack, Yahoo! Open Hack Day

To help promote web innovation and openness, Yahoo! is hosting Open Hack 2008 for developers next Friday and Saturday, September 12 & 13, at our Sunnyvale campus and we invite you to join us.In our SearchMonkey- and Yahoo! Search BOSS-focused sessions, we'll share where the platforms are headed, gather important feedback and give you time to get creative and build apps.We're calling all SearchMonkey and BOSS developers and partners. But space is limited so head to our Hack Day sign-up page as soon as possible to reserve your spot. If you sign up, please mention "Yahoo! Search" in your submission form and we'll make sure there's a ticket waiting for the first fifty who apply.Check out the schedule below for SearchMonkey and BOSS sessions. Hope to see you in Sunnyvale.Friday, September 1210 - 10:50 a.m.SearchMonkey Workshop (C2)3 - 3:50 p.m.BOSS Workshop (C3)Yahoo! Search Blog team
Building with BOSS — New Products to Share
It's been two months since we began "opening up" the Yahoo! Search infrastructure with the launch of Yahoo! Search BOSS and we've already seen some great products created. We shared a handful with you last month, and we're excited to see that the creativity hasn't slowed down. From new vertical search engines to a personalized search platform, developers are using BOSS to come up with a range of new products. As we promised, below are a few more examples of the interesting products that have been built using BOSS. 123People.com: Currently focused on the European market, 123People.com delivers comprehensive and centralized profiles including images, videos, phone numbers, email addresses, social networking, and Wikipedia profiles related to an individual. The site uses the XML BOSS interface to query Yahoo! Search's image and web search index in real-time. Based on the geographic location of the user and semantic analysis, 123people applies ranking algorithms and presents results tailor-made to people search.

askBOSS: One of our very own, Saurabh Sahni, explored the use of natural language processing in image search, which has historically been limited to text search. His mashup, askBOSS, is an extension of Vik Singh's QNA mashup and works by using the Mashup Framework to predict the answer to a user's question and then queries the BOSS image search API for corresponding images.

BuildaSearch: Using the BOSS Web Search API to generate customizable search results, BuildaSearch takes all the complexities out of building a search engine and allows you to control the name, look and feel of your search engine. For example, one of our team members designed a search engine to look for dog friendly activities in the bay area in just a few minutes. Engines built using BuildaSearch can be hosted on either their site or elsewhere on the web using an API provided by BuildaSearch.

Remember, if you're building mashups, make sure to tag them with "bossmashup" on Delicious so we can discover them. We'll continue to share new products that we come across. Hopefully, these examples will help to get your wheels turning. Happy building!If you're feeling inspired to start building today, sign-up for Yahoo!'s Open Hack 2008 and join your fellow developers. Please mark your registration with "Yahoo! Search" so we can save you a space. The BOSS team