SearchMonkey, BOSS and Hadoop Future Unclear After the Microsoft-Yahoo Deal

Microsoft and Yahoo may have finally reached an agreement, with Bing powering Yahoo Search for the next 10 years, but the deal raises a lot of questions about some of Yahoo's products and technologies based on or related to search. The biggest concerns are about SearchMonkey, its structured data offering for developers, and BOSS, Yahoo's search API, but, to a lesser degree, about Hardoop, the open-source computing grid platform to which Yahoo is a great contributor as well.

Some of the questions were answered by a post on the company's developers' blog and, to some extent, by Microsoft representatives. “For SearchMonkey and BOSS, we currently do not have anything concrete to tell you. Clearly, we’ll need to work with Microsoft to determine what makes the most sense for you and for us,” the post read. “Regardless, we are certainly committed to continuing to innovate on the user experience of search all across Yahoo! and on continuing to engage with the developer community on several fronts, opening up leading audience experiences and data to third-party innovation,” Ashim Chhabra, one of the main developers for the BOSS project, also wrote.

Microsoft seems to welcome the new technologies and plans to try to integrate them with the current technology, but it may very well be just an exchange of niceties and there are no guarantees as of yet. Microsoft Senior Vice President Yusuf Mehdi has revealed that engineers from both companies have already been collaborating to see how they will move forward.

For other technologies the answer is clearer, with Yahoo stating that they won't be affected by the deal. These include the Yahoo User Interface Library, YQL Yahoo's query language and Pipes. However, the future is murkier for one technology, which Yahoo has been actively supporting and developing, Hadoop, an open-source software framework for large-scale distributed computing applications inspired by Google's similar technologies.

Hadoop has become very successful, being used by many large-scale operations, like Facebook, with as much as 70 percent of the development coming from Yahoo. But with Yahoo's largest application using the framework, the Yahoo Search Webmap, rendered pretty much useless, it's unclear if the company will continue to invest so much in the open-source technology, even though other Yahoo services are powered by it.