Yahoo! The BOSS is coming

Yahoo Inc co-founder David Filo, in Bangalore for the company's 'open hack day', says that the upcoming Yahoo BOSS ('build your own search service') will have a variety of commercial models, including revenue sharing on advertising and co-branding of sites, apart from a fee-based model that the company announced last week.

The BOSS application allows developers to use Yahoo's search infrastructure and algorithms to create their own customised search services. Using the programme, an individual or a start-up business can come up with an application and quickly scale it up for the desired purposes.

Among options being considered, advertisers on Yahoo Search will be given the option to also advertise on websites of Yahoo's BOSS partners, Filo said. If developers are not interested in revenue-sharing on advertising, they can pay a traffic fee to use the Yahoo platform.

Yahoo plans to start charging a fee late in the second half of this year for use of the service beyond a set daily limit of search queries. Filo said the infrastructure and engineering costs for search are expensive.

It will take between six months to a year for new services on the BOSS platform to gain traction. When that happens, Yahoo will be open to new business relationships with BOSS partners. Building a relationship with developers through advertising, or licensing of their technology, or co-branding, would be easier if they are using Yahoo's platform, Filo said.

Earlier this month, Yahoo began to test Search Pad, an online notepad for users of its search engine that allows them to save links, type notes, and copy and paste content from Web sites. Users of Search Pad can now share information from the notepad through e-mail or print it out.

Yahoo will work on a number of other options for users to share information from Search Pad, including posting information from the notepad on social networking sites like Facebook, Filo said. The kind of information typically stored on Search Pad may not be the kind that would be shared on instant messaging programs or Twitter, but Yahoo will consider adding these options if users want it, he added.

Yahoo is also focusing its resources and will drop some products and projects this year, according to Filo. The company is closing down its Briefcase online storage service by 30 March because users are increasingly using e-mail for storage. Briefcase is an example of a product that wasn't critical to users, Filo said.

The search market is dominated by Google and Yahoo and as a result of that dominance, fewer new ideas are introduced, he added. Even though the company falls behind Google Inc. in the Indian search engine market, it has the largest share in the email segment, which also has a Hindi mail client.

In its 'open hack days', Yahoo asks participants to create Web applications using Yahoo's application programming interfaces or open source libraries. The idea is to "look and learn about all the platforms we have, create some interesting applications…we learn from them, they learn from us," Filo said.

Yahoo is thus opening its mail platform to third-party use for customisation, expecting students, engineers, start-ups and established companies to build applications. "We don't know what's going to happen. If we knew about good ideas, we'd be doing it ourselves," said Filo.

Hackers welcome
At the open hack day in Bangalore, one can see some 350 participants slumped on beanbags or sprawling in their chairs, trying to re-work codes. Yahoo India research and development (R&D) chief executive Sharad Sharma thinks this is the right way to involve the Indian community to customise existing applications according to local needs.

For the first time, Yahoo recently organised Hack U, the university version, at the Indian Institutes of Technology in Delhi and Mumbai, and also signed an R&D agreement on cloud computing with the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad.

"India is being used as a lab, a test market, for the rest of the world," said Sharma, citing the example of Glue, which was developed in Bangalore and recently launched for worldwide use. This service enables the user to put together different topic pages for browsing convenience.

Yahoo expects at least 40 good hacks to emerge from this event. For Filo, who was once famous for sleeping under his desk in Yahoo's pre-initial public offering days, this is universal nerd culture. "It's (a culture) still there in the Silicon Valley," Filo said, adding that in "hacking culture" India was lagging behind the UK and the US.