OStatic digs into Yahoo’s new BOSS offering
July 11th, 2008Yahoo recently announced the release of BOSS which allows you to utilize Yahoo’s search infrastructure in any way you’d like. It’s an ‘open web services platform’ which means that you aren’t just massaging results the way that Google’s Search API lets you, but rather you can do higher level manipulation of not just search results, but the DB of records. The idea is that your users don’t have to ever be aware of where you got the results or records, its just ethereal data.
The BOSS Mashup Framework is a Python library with a vaguely SQL-like syntax. Using it, you can combine BOSS results with other bits of XML, JSON, or RSS/RDF. In addition to merging results, it can handle sorting, grouping, removing duplicates, and so on. Armed with this Framework (and of course Python skills) you can easily combine Yahoo’s search results with just about any other data you can get your hands on.