Yahoo BOSS just behind Ask.com for search
Internet pioneer's program for sharing search results now handles 10 million search queries per day. Next year's goal for Yahoo: making it profitable.
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Yahoo's BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service), which lets others use the company's search technology, is getting some traction.
The service, announced in July, now handles 10 million queries per day, Yahoo announced Monday. And with Google still king of the heap, and Microsoft breathing down Yahoo's neck, the company needs every scrap of influence it can get in the search market.
"We believe growing to more than 100 queries a second in just over 5 months says something about the demand for an open search platform," Bill Michels of the BOSS Team said in a blog post.
"As a point of reference, the total queries from these developer-built, BOSS-powered search engines would rank ahead of the combined searches done on both Facebook and Amazon, and just behind Ask.com," Michels said, citing ComScore statistics.
BOSS queries don't count toward Yahoo's market share, but they could help the company out. That's because heavy-traffic partners using the search infrastructure must either show Yahoo search ads or sign some form of revenue-sharing partnership.
More changes will come to BOSS next year, including the revenue-sharing initiative. "Since launch, we've been focused on adding features and building up the ecosystem. We'll maintain that emphasis in 2009, as well as adding monetizing capabilities to the platform," Michels said.
With BOSS, partners get extensive leeway with Yahoo search results. They may reorder them, mix them with their own results, or filter out particular results, for example. Yahoo handles much of the heavy lifting, including crawling the Web, indexing the pages, and delivering the search results through the BOSS API (application programming interface).