So this will be my first post on simori. I had been observing this site for quite sometime and found very useful information. In case you have n’t got me yet, I am yashh. So here I am to add a few tidbits of mine.

For about an year I was wondering if google provided any API’s for the 3rd party players to utilize google search. In fact google has supported the Soap API for few years. The Soap API provided a lot of freedom for the developers to utilize the Google search remotely. The main advantage was that we could hide the backend queries from the presentation. In simple terms the results do not have the brand name google. Although google limited the queries to 1000 per day it was worth while. As of December 5, 2006, google is no longer issuing any new API keys to the developers and instead started promoting the AJAX search APIwhich does not give the developers the freedom to manipulate the presentation of search results.

Now it is Yahoo which has come the BOSS api which is used to launch search products. The first obvious question is how is it different from the previous Yahoo API.

  1. Unlimited queries per day.
  2. No restriction on presentation.
  3. Search Web, Images & News.
  4. Get Spelling sugestions.
  5. Reorder the search results & many other.

So let’s get started with a small exercise to know how Y! BOSS API works. Sign up for an BOSS Application ID. For this excercise I am using Y! BOSS mashup python library. You can download the library here. Unzip the library. Open config.json file in code editor and edit the application id with yours. Fire up your terminal (if on mac or command prompt on windows).

#!/bin/sh

$ cd Desktop/boss_mashup_framework_0.1
$ export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:$PWD
$ python
Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Apr 15 2008, 22:57:26)
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5465)] on darwin
>>> from yos.boss import ysearch
>>> data = ysearch.search(‘python’, count=10)
>>> data
# You find all the top search results for the keyword ‘python’
in a dictionary format. Voila you are able to search the web from your terminal.

Will Larson developed a python wrapper for the Yahoo BOSS boss_array.py. This eases our development by a large amount. Here is a good tutorial using the wrapper.

Conclusion: Yahoo BOSS api is certainly a boon for third party apps and developers. All it needs to improve is the speed and accuracy. It will take some time for the developers to accustom to it and develop new API’s over BOSS.

I am disabling comments for this posts as I already wrote this post in my personal blog. Head over to my blog to share some feedback with me.