Larry Dignan and Tom Steinert-Threlkeld posted a very intriguing story about Yahoo! Search going Open Source, or more accurately, Open APIs. The post in their Between The Lines blog is entitled Yahoo’s desperate search times call for open source.
Yahoo has opened its search for developers to customize in its latest step in what it calls its Open Strategy, a plan to make Yahoo a platform. The effort is dubbed Yahoo Search BOSS, which allows “allows developers and companies to create and launch web-scale search products by utilizing the same infrastructure and technology that powers Yahoo! Search.”
Yahoo! is billing BOSS as the next step in their Open Search ecosystem, and it has some interesting possibilities. It may be, as the post points out, a move made out of desperation, which could bode ill for developers who invest a lot of time in writing to the APIs. What happens if Microsoft does finally make an offer they can't refuse?
I wish I could write more about this right now, but instead I must make an apology. I haven't posted much in the last two weeks (or maybe not at all, I can't recall) due to my being away at NetSci 2008 in Norwich, Norfolk, UK, followed by a brief appearance at work and then a long weekend holiday mini-vacation. Now that I'm back, I'm swamped with catch-up work, so I am having trouble finding posting time. But this news item was worthy of mention, because it bears on my hot-button topic, consumer health search. This was my topic at NetSci 2008, and I will soon be posting my slides and some thoughts and ideas about the current state of and future directions for consumer health search. I'm taking some vacation time this weekend to get caught up on personal things, including blogging.
I wish I had time to play with their APIs! Maybe that, too, will be soon...
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