Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana. Groucho Marx

July 10th, 2008 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Innovations, Reviews | No Comments »

The World Time Engine is committed to bringing pinpoint time information to the WWW and beyond!

Through the development of a truly ground-breaking location resolution system for obtaining local time by place name and/or geo-coordinates they are building up their service to become the most comprehensive time service available anywhere in the world.

At AltSearchEngines, I am in Virginia on the East Coast, Nitin is in California on the West Coast, Peggy is in Germany, Rafi is in Israel, and Richard and Kaila are in New Zealand.  If anyone needs a World Time Search Engine, we do!

Not only do they cover every country, city, town, village, zip code, point of interest and street on earth – they also provide geo-local time information allowing you to use GPS co-ordinates data to resolve the local time. They have packaged this whole system in to a Google-esque search box for your convenience meaning that local time for any place on earth is never more than one click away.

“The information provided on our website will always remain free and open to anyone wishing to access it.  We always strive to maintain the most accurate and comprehensive database of time information in the world and are continually updating our service to ensure that the information supplied is current and correct.”

Who’s the BOSS? The Alt Search Engines Respond

July 10th, 2008 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Alts, Guest Authors, News | 2 Comments »

Siva Kumar

There are a lot of vertical content sites that will no doubt tap into the BOSS offering from Yahoo, as the strength of Yahoo’s overall search comprehensiveness has been a missing piece of the puzzle for such sites. This also opens a whole new realm of innovation from startups in areas like semantic search and social search in particular, and kudos to Yahoo for opening the door to further push that envelope.

However, the emerging vertical search engines particularly in areas like real estate, job search, travel and shopping, all require deep vertical crawling and subject-specific classification technology that is not available in Yahoo Search and the BOSS offering does not change this. As in our case, TheFind.com was developed with the sole purpose of creating the best shopping search experience for consumers that embraces core, comprehensive search technology and thorough classification of products and stores as a starting point. As such, our powerful technology successfully competes and often surpasses the usefulness of product search results offered by the likes of Yahoo and Google, and our growing popularity with consumers attests to our proprietary vertical search technology. We do believe that the Yahoo BOSS announcement definitely validates the need for comprehensiveness in vertical search applications and ups the ante for players in vertical spaces.

We will be introducing more shopping -centric technology before the Holiday season that will apply innovative software to better addresses real-world shopping behavior. Stay tuned.

Alex Zivkovic
This makes a huge difference for alternative search engines such as ours at www.cluuz.com. As part of the Yahoo! BOSS alpha process we implemented the new API and from personal experience with the BOSS team I can tell you that they have a great vision. With this move Yahoo! is fostering innovation in the search space as the Alts are the ones doing all the interesting work in search these days.





Elliott Ng

First of all congratulations to Yahoo! “Rebel Alliance” for taking this first step on what might be a disruptive move to compete against the Don’t-Be-Evil Empire! (h/t Dave McClure who coined this phrase). Now you will have to Use The Force and go much further to power an industry of distinctively unique Alternative Search Engines, like Uptake. (Disclosure: we are not using BOSS but plan to evaluate BOSS Custom for our use on providing backfill results)
BOSS: one of Yahoo!’s last hopes
Photo courtesy: Revell.de

But it took more than an X-Wing to destroy the Death Star. It Took the Force.

Here are the salient features of BOSS and where we think it has to go further to truly power innovative new search experiences.

Three levels, but only BOSS Custom has real potential for a highly differentiated service offering.

There are three levels to the BOSS program, according to SearchEngineWatch:

  • self-service API
  • BOSS University for academics
  • BOSS Custom, designed for companies with their own ranking and/or presentation methodologies. Or alternative, companies with proprietary data that can help as an additional signal that factors into relevancy.

I’ll go over all the aspects of the BOSS program below, and then come back to BOSS Custom as evidence that Yahoo! just might Use The Force. But the basic features looks like a free version of Google Custom Search Engine.
Please read the rest of Elliott’s post on the UpTake.com blog here:




The hakia Blog
We are pleased to announce our participation in Yahoo!’s Search BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) today. As part of this initiative, we have access to one of the largest Web directories on the Internet, which accelerates hakia’s QDEXing process and semantic analysis of the Web’s content. QDEXing is a critical element that replaces traditional index to allow scalable semantic search. Without this kind of infrastructure, application of semantic technology is destined to be limited, such as covering Wikipedia only.

The search landscape is currently in a dynamic stage of reinvention. Yahoo! is inviting more innovation to enter the market, while Microsoft validates the importance of semantic search technology with its recent acquisition of Powerset. For the latter, we congratulate both parties, yet are disappointed by the fact that we’ve lost our favorite competitor. From now on, we will look for traces of the Powerset-effect in LiveSearch.

For hakia’s part, we will continue the momentum as we keep up our progress towards coming out of BETA later this year. As we always say, the every day application of semantic technology is an irreversible, long-overdue process. It is coming…


Yakov Sadchikov

We’ve been using it to power web and image search on Quintura.com since Nov 2006. Apart from, for example, a visual representation of search results, one needs better relevancy and deepness of search as well as better monetization system. Yahoo! does not have that.

Their search API is becoming more open and flexible but a way they index the web is no better than Google or Microsoft..

We believe that the best way of “beating” Google is not by building a better search destination site, but by changing the paradigm – GIVE REASONS FOR USERS NOT TO MAKE A DECISION TO GO TO A SEARCH ENGINE. Because when the think search engine, they think Google..

Then we move into powering site search for web portals and making more interactive. Maxim.com and Cosmo.ru (Russian Cosmopolitan magazine’s site) are the first who realized that they can keep site visitors on the site longer with Quintura. Here is more on http://blog.quintura.com

Essentially we are creating environments where users just keep exploring the passions, their interests, their information needs from where they are on the web. People go to search engines when they cant find what they want where they are!

Re: BOSS – details from the Yahoo! Search Blog

July 10th, 2008 by Guest Author
Posted in Guest Authors, Majors, News | 2 Comments »

Yahoo! Search is taking another step in extending the Yahoo! Open Strategy with the launch of BOSS, a web services platform that allows developers and companies to create and launch web-scale search products by utilizing the same  technology that powers Yahoo! Search.

Our goal with BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is simple — foster innovation in the search landscape. As anyone who follows the search industry knows, the barriers to successfully building a high quality, web-scale search engine are incredibly high. Doing so requires hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in engineering, sciences and core infrastructure — from crawling and indexing technology to relevancy and machine learning algorithms, to stuff as mundane as data centers, servers and power. Because competing successfully in web search requires an investment of this scale, new players have effectively been prohibited from delivering credible alternatives to Yahoo! and Google. We believe the BOSS platform will begin to change that.

So what is BOSS?
BOSS is a new, open platform that offers programmatic access to the entire Yahoo! Search index via an API. BOSS allows developers to take advantage of Yahoo!’s production search infrastructure and technology, combine that with their own unique assets, and create their own search experiences. While search APIs have been available for some time, BOSS removes many of the usage restrictions that have prevented other companies from using them to build innovative new search engines.

Here’s a quick summary of what’s available today:
* 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

These capabilities are really just a first step — we’re already working on expanding the API functionality and providing more access to Yahoo! Search Technology.

In addition to a self-serve API, we’re also partnering with a handful of Internet companies with large user bases or unique assets to collaboratively develop next gen search products using Yahoo!’s full suite of search technology. To learn more about BOSS Custom, click here.

What’s in it for Yahoo! and partners?
Why would Yahoo! open up its search infrastructure and technology to developers, entrepreneurs and companies who could use it to compete with us? It’s really quite simple. First, we believe that being open is core to Yahoo!’s future success — opening our network, opening our own search experience via SearchMonkey, and now opening our search infrastructure via BOSS — will lead to innovation both on Yahoo! and powered by Yahoo!. For BOSS, we see a virtuous circle in which partners deliver innovative search experiences, and as they grow their audiences and usage we have more data that can be used to improve our own Yahoo! Search experience and as a result, improve the quality of results our BOSS partners and their users get. Second, we do see new revenue streams from BOSS. In the coming months, we’ll be launching a monetization platform for BOSS that will enable Yahoo! to expand its ad network and enable BOSS partners to jointly participate in the compelling economics of search.

What’s in it for users?
More choice. BOSS will enable a range of fundamentally different search experiences. These new search products will provide value to users along multiple dimensions, such as vertical specialization, new relevance indicators and ranking models, and innovative UI implementations. Our hope is that the resulting expansion in user choice will have the effect of fragmenting the increasingly consolidated search market in much the same way that cable TV dramatically increased programming choices for television viewers.

Kick the tires and get started
Want to kick the tires on what BOSS-powered search could look like? As part of an alpha program, we’ve been working with a handful of start-ups and developers who have already begun using BOSS. Here are a few early examples of what’s possible with BOSS:

* Me.dium, a start-up that’s built an innovative collaborative browsing product used BOSS to build a web-scale search engine that leverages its real-time surfing data. By combining the depth of the Yahoo! Search index with its insight into where users are browsing, Me.dium can provide its users with a unique buzz-based search experience.
* Hakia, a semantic search start-up, is using BOSS to access the Yahoo! Search index and dramatically increase the speed with which it can semantically analyze the web. With BOSS providing this important infrastructure, Hakia is able to deliver a language search experience that isn’t available from any of the “big three” search providers or other semantic search engines.
* Daylife To-Go is a new self-service, hosted publishing platform from Daylife. Anyone can use this platform to generate customizable pages and widgets. Daylife To-Go uses the BOSS API platform to power its web search module.
* Cluuz, a next-generation search engine prototype, generates easier-to-understand search results through semantic cluster graphs, image extraction and tag clouds. The Cluuz analysis is performed in real-time on results returned from the BOSS API.

The BOSS Team