Yahoo launches build-your-own search engine

 

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Posted on 10 Jul 2008 at 08:56

Yahoo will let customers, academics and even rivals build customised web search services on top of its own technology.

In the embattled internet company's biggest step yet to carve out a more distinctive strategy in the web search market, Yahoo is introducing a new strategy it calls "Build your Own Search Service" (Boss).

In addition to letting developers create their own text-link search services, Yahoo is also unlocking its image and news databases to let outsiders create their own permutations of Yahoo News, or Flickr, its photo-sharing site. Yahoo will even supply spell-checking services to partners.

Yahoo is fighting to remain independent in the face of a challenge by dissident investors seeking to dump its management and board in order to reopen merger talks with Microsoft.

The move highlights Yahoo's own ambition to continue competing against Google, even as it partners with its crosstown rival. Last month, the two companies reached a deal in which Yahoo will let Google sell a portion of the web advertising that runs alongside Yahoo's own search results.

Staggering start-up costs

Yahoo estimates that for start-ups to develop new search technologies and run that across the entire web takes a minimum capital investment of $300 million in terms of hardware, networks, data, coding and expertise.

"We want to disrupt the search market by removing that entry barrier and make room for more players and more ideas," says Prabhakar Raghavan, the chief strategist for Yahoo Search.

Were Yahoo's search services to be embraced by new start-ups, the company envisions a scenario in which its market share might remain steady but its resale partners and developers would explode, taking share from rival Google.

Based on recent industry data, Google had a 62% share of the US Web search market. Raghavan believes that share will sink below 50%, while Yahoo's own share, now at 21%, might more than double through its resale partnership strategy.

Yahoo is seeking to make its search technology the underlying engine for the next generation of search services, borrowing a tactic familiar in the mobile phone industry, where established operators rent out spare network access to Virgin Mobile, for example, which owns no capacity of their own.

Raghavan envisions attracting start-ups seeking to build services in the field of social search - where the search results users see are influenced by what their friends find interesting.

He sees the rise of industry-specific search firms focused on medical or finance, for example, or visual search, which allows users to search by image rather than text.

Two early partners Yahoo has signed up to work on Boss are personalised search start-up Me.dium and natural language firm Hakia, which relies on semantic search technology similar to that of Powerset, which Microsoft recently agreed to acquire.

First Amazon.com, and lately Google have adopted a similar approach by allowing start-ups and other companies to rent access to their massive data centers, storage and certain web applications. But Yahoo is going several steps further by giving access to sophisticated search technology.

Search shake-up

Boss is the second phase of Yahoo's year-long effort to remake its web search strategy. In April, Yahoo introduced SearchMonkey, a service that allows website owners and developers to control how Yahoo searches appear on their site.

SearchMonkey allows a site aimed at feline fanciers to display a version of Yahoo search that only has pictures of cats, for example. Boss goes far beyond how Yahoo search might appear on a website, allowing developers to tinker with the basic mechanisms of Yahoo search to build separate services.