14 DAY TRIAL // The search advertising market has become more and more competitive, and none of the leading companies wants to fall behind. Today, Yahoo! introduced a new type of API that allows the advertisers to blend in their "special sauce," which is how the representatives of the company refer to the possibility of intervening in the display of the search results.
BOSS, an acronym for Build Your Own Service, gives the advertisers the chance to use, free of charge, the crawling, indexing, ranking and relevancy technologies developed by Yahoo!. Moreover, the clients of the company can perform changes in the order of the displayed results, in order to make sure that the set up is in their best advantage. Since nothing in the world is for free, Yahoo! is up for a barter. Some of its ads will be displayed on the results pages of the BOSS clients. In exchange, Yahoo!'s technologies, plus the infrastructure, will be up for grabs. The search monetization, that will make the search revenue stream possible, will be implemented, as Yahoo! assures, in the following months.
The new application comes with a series of improvements. While the previous Yahoo! Search APIs had a 5,000 queries per day limit, BOSS allows the users an unlimited number. The clients will also benefit from no restrictions on presentation, a blending of proprietary and Yahoo! Search content, with a white label that allows them to rebrand Yahoo!'s technologies without giving particular credits.
The fact that the competition within the search advertising market mostly engages only three pawns, who are constantly trying to attract more customers, is underscored by Prabhakar Raghavan, chief strategist for Yahoo! Search. "Today, the search market is generally limited to three major search engines to drive innovation and growth," he said, adding that "BOSS opens up the playing field for developers and companies to disrupt the search market, become principals in search and build new Web search experiences that offer more choice for users."