"We are exploring a potential fee-based structure as well as ad-revenue models that will enable BOSS developers to monetize their offerings. When we roll out these changes, BOSS will no longer be a free service to developers."
Seems fair enough to me, depending on how the pricing looks. This will affect DuckDuckGo which I believe is built on top of BOSS.
"Several search-related web services will continue to be supported, but strictly through YQL. These include the Yahoo! Term Extraction Web Service, Related Suggestion, and Spelling Suggestion. Other non-BOSS search APIs such as Web Search, Image Search, News Search and Site Explorer APIs will shut down with no further support in YQL. "
No more web search API is unfortunate.
"On October 1, 2010, we will close the SearchMonkey developer tool, gallery, and app preferences."
I have to admit I never quite figured out what SearchMonkey was for.
"We will be evaluating all our Geo, Maps, and Local APIs--updating or shutting down some of them, and working with our strategic partner, Nokia, on others. We will work with our developer community to ensure a smooth transition in all instances and we will share more details about these decisions in September."
This sent a shiver down me. After avoiding Yahoo! GeoPlanet for a few years out of fear it might get shut down, I finally decided to go full-hog with it on several recent projects (since Twitter and Foursquare had bet on it, so I figured it was probably safe). I really hope they don't kill it off - it's an incredibly useful API.
Doesn't DuckDuckGo use YahooBOSS and/or The Search API? Will this effect development(or the business) of DDG? DDG is awesome, so I'm just curious here.
Edit: I am aware DDG uses other sources, just curious how this affects things.
Thx for the support and concern everyone. I've made a smooth transition to Bing, and BOSS is really a back-up at this point. There are other decent providers for what I use it for as well (Entireweb, Ask, Infoseek, etc.) and I am also looking to those for more backup (Entireweb already in place).
Moving to Bing proved that the way I was doing things it was possible to move and not effect the service much, so I'm really happy about that. Of course, the BOSS terms may be decent anyway. We'll have to wait and find out.
You will not, and will not permit your users or other third parties to:
...
(c) modify, filter, obscure, or replace the text, images, or other content of Bing results, including by changing the order in which Bing results appear (but this limitation will not apply to Bing results of type "Web"), intermixing Bing results with search results from other sources, or intermixing with Bing results any other content so that the other content appears to be part of Bing results
These terms seem to pretty much prohibit using Bing search results for something like DDG, because all they let you do is change ordering. Am I missing something?
Site Explorer going away is going to make people sad too. I wonder how many non-pc users are going to be frustrated by the Bing webmaster tools requiring silverlight.
The last time I tried it wouldn't work on a Mac. It seemed to require a very recent version of Silverlight and it acted like it was going to do something then gave me a bunch of blank boxes.
That's why you don't rely on free third party API's.
I'm seriously thinking of starting a Freebase alternative, but where you can pay to replicate and run your own copy of the database. Anybody think this would catch on?
They have dumps available, but their application and server are proprietary. And now that Google controls them I want nothing to do with it (other than maybe using one of their dumps to start me off).
We've said there will be ways to get BOSS without having to pay a fee. This will probably involve including advertising. The exactly details of this aren't available right now though.
Disclaimer: I work for Yahoo! I also have no insight into the Bing API roadmap.
To quote from the Bing Terms of service:
3. CODE OF CONDUCT / RESTRICTIONS ON USE.
You will not, and will not permit your users or other third parties to:
(o) commercialize (i.e., sell, rent, or lease) Bing results;
12. PRE-RELEASE. The API (and related services) are pre-release versions. They may not work the way a final version of the API (and such related services) would. We may change the API (or these services) for a final, commercial version. We also may not release a commercial version, in our sole discretion.
As I read these conditions, so far the Bing API seems similar to how the BOSS API was before this post. Bing may results not be "commercialized". We've announced that ours is going commercial BOSS, that seems like a good thing for actual business rather than just hacking.
Fk! I was building one search engine based on BOSS! Who will going to repay my time and energy?! I hate when the big companies decide just to unplug the product or worse "it's no longer free". I feel like a full,.
Seems fair enough to me, depending on how the pricing looks. This will affect DuckDuckGo which I believe is built on top of BOSS.
"Several search-related web services will continue to be supported, but strictly through YQL. These include the Yahoo! Term Extraction Web Service, Related Suggestion, and Spelling Suggestion. Other non-BOSS search APIs such as Web Search, Image Search, News Search and Site Explorer APIs will shut down with no further support in YQL. "
No more web search API is unfortunate.
"On October 1, 2010, we will close the SearchMonkey developer tool, gallery, and app preferences."
I have to admit I never quite figured out what SearchMonkey was for.
"We will be evaluating all our Geo, Maps, and Local APIs--updating or shutting down some of them, and working with our strategic partner, Nokia, on others. We will work with our developer community to ensure a smooth transition in all instances and we will share more details about these decisions in September."
This sent a shiver down me. After avoiding Yahoo! GeoPlanet for a few years out of fear it might get shut down, I finally decided to go full-hog with it on several recent projects (since Twitter and Foursquare had bet on it, so I figured it was probably safe). I really hope they don't kill it off - it's an incredibly useful API.