Yahoo! BOSS in Bucharest

BOSS Power

Ted DRAKE

Yahoo! France

Bucharest, Romania 6-7/11/2008

Brief intro

I joined Yahoo! in 2005 to work on the first major mash up in web 2.0: Yahoo! Tech

I have worked on Answers, Finance, Canadian Finance, Global Finance, Platforms, Accessibility Stakeholders Group, IE7 Task Force, and International Yahoo! Developer Network.

I studied fine arts, not computer science.

BOSS Basics Exactly the same as other search APIs Only completely different!

BOSS Basics

Free

No rate limit

Freedom

Mash Change the ranking Change the design Keep Yahoo! a secret Cache and store results Use Google APIs Cross check with Digg News, Web, Image, Spelling suggestions Grab user info from Facebook Flickr Images Creative Commons search

HACK!

Search as Engine

Yahoo! Tech: product category and name used to generate various modules via search on different APIs. (implied query)

Yahoo! News: Full coverage pages are driven entirely by a search interface (defined query)

What is the most important part of your application?

The results display?

The text ads?

The rounded borders?

The smooth animations?

The perfect URL?

THE QUERY STRING!!!

The Query

Tells you what the user is looking for

Generates related topics

Powers secondary APIs

Can be generated by a search box, URL, tags,or keyword extraction from the page.

The Query is your BFF!

BOSS Details

REST or SOAP based API. (examples are REST)

XML or JSON output

Web, News, Image, and Spelling Suggestion services

I18N ready (language, region, UTF-8)

Recognizes most search filters from Yahoo! and Google (backdoor hacks)

Site Specific Results

Search only one site: /ysearch/web/v1/golf +site:vw.com ?

Search from a select group of sites: /ysearch/web/v1/golf? sites=vw.com,vwtrendsweb.com,performancevwmag.com,caranddriver.com

Tag or Title Filters

Use the inurl: filter to simulate tag search: /ysearch/web/v1/ inurl:golf ?

Use the intitle: filter to filter by results with query in title /ysearch/web/v1/ intitle:golf ?

Get Related Sites

You can find sites related to each result by triggering secondary queries. /ysearch/web/v1/ related: http://www.caranddriver.com/car/2006-models/2006-golf.html ?

BOSS Key Terms

Each result will have the categories Yahoo has assigned to the page.

The categories are listed in order of relevance.

Official Partners can get more details about the relevance.

/web/v1/scirocco?format=xml& view=keyterms

What this allows?

Each result can have related searches

Create an array of all related tags and display the most common at the top of the page (this is what powers the search suggestions on Yahoo! Search)

Use these quality tags for secondary APIs

What it looks like <keyterms> <terms> <term>Bucharest</term> <term>city</term> <term>Romanian</term> <term>population</term> <term>Romania</term> <term>architecture</term> <term>city centre</term> <term>clubs</term> </terms> </keyterms>

BOSS Mashup Framework

Perl based framework to mash BOSS API with secondary web services and proprietary data

“Easy” to hookup to Google APP Engine (I could never get past the Google signup procedure)

Powers the infamous YUIL (4 hour search) project.

Lessons Learned

Don’t forget to declare UTF-8 encoding on the page: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8 ">

Let PHP do the messy work BOSS requires url encoding of the request. Use the http_build_query() function $qrystrarray = array( 'sites' => $Site, 'appid' => $Appid, 'format' => 'xml', 'start' => $start, 'count' => '15');$qryString = http_build_query($qrystrarray);

Users are Evil

Don’t open your site to Cross Site Scripting.

Never trust your users.

Never display unfiltered User Generated Content!

This includes query params generated by radio buttons and checkboxes!

Tips for Safety

encode your Query when creating page title, pagination links, “You searched for...” $niceQuery = htmlentities($_REQUEST['query']); $safeQuery = urlencode($_REQUEST['query']);