14 DAY TRIAL // Now that Yahoo Search's faith is sealed, it looks like everyone has something good to say about it. Despite not being able to gain any market share for years, Yahoo Search had some really good things going for it. One of them is the BOSS API, which allows third parties to build custom search engines using a very flexible and powerful tool that could be seeing more searches than Microsoft's entire search engine.
The latest official figure is the 30 million daily queries Yahoo revealed in May. Based on the latest numbers and previous growth, TechCrunch estimates that, by now, the number of searches made using the BOSS API could match the total number of searches conducted on Bing even with the most conservative estimates. But even at 30 million daily searches, adding up to 900 million monthly queries, BOSS on its own would be the fourth largest search engine, with 6 percent of the market, as the latest numbers for Bing show the search engine seeing 1.21 billion queries in July.
Searches made using BOSS grew at a very solid pace, doubling every two or three months. The number of searches went from around 20 million in February to 30 million by April. The growth rate may have slowed but even with a 30 percent rise, reaching 39 million daily searches through Yahoo BOSS, it would put the search volume at 1.17 billion monthly, very close to Bing's 1.21 billion.
With slightly more optimistic estimates the searches would outnumber Bing's. With a 40 percent growth BOSS would see 1.26 billion monthly searches and at 50 percent the number would go up to 1.35 billion. All is not lost, as BOSS will survive the merger of the two search engines, though its future isn't totally clear. Still, the technology has more than proved its worth and it is very unlikely Microsoft won't see the value as well.