Slides for Rahul Hampole's BOSS talk for Yahoo! Hack Europe: London 2013.

2. HACKING WITH YAHOO!
BOSS
Rahul Hampole
Sr Product Manager Yahoo! BOSS
rhampole@yahoo-inc.com
@ysearchboss

3. WHAT DOES BOSS GIVE YOU?
 Search Data and Infrastructure
 Monetization (We give you Ads!!)
 Support and Tools
BOSS is a service that provides you (the
developer) flexible access to different types of
data from Yahoo and allows you to build
powerful commercial applications with that
data.
BOSS provides you Search Advertising
and simple terms so that you can
monetize that innovative product and
continue to invest your personal time in
it.
BOSS also gives you Support and Tools to
get your product working.

4. Restful XML and JSON API
Search Data - Web, Image, Spelling, News, Also Try, Blogs and Search Ads
Geo Services – Placefinder & PlaceSpotter
Flexibility to Blend and Re-rank Results
 Create your own look and feel
Change ranking
Mix it with other API’s
oAuth based Authentication
WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?

5. WHAT ELSE DO YOU GET
Web and Limited Web results (smaller subset)
 Complex query combinations and filters
 Searches for content on multiple markets
Image attributes like height, width, etc
Time span filtering for News Search
Extended abstracts
Recognizes most search filters from Yahoo! and Google (backdoor hacks)

6. YAHOO! BOSS GEO SERVICS
Placefinder
1. Geocoding – Give it an
address and get back a
Lat/Lon
2. Address normalization
3. Reverse Geocoding – Give
it a lat/long and get an
address
PlaceSpotter
1. Recognize geographical
entities available in textual
content
2. Understand the meaning
of those entities
3. Couple with Geoplanet to
understand geographical
meaning
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Learn more at http://developer.yahoo.com/boss/geo/

7. HOW DO I HACK WITH IT?

8. THE QUERY
Tells you what the user is looking for
Powers secondary APIs
Can be generated by a search box, URL,
tags or keyword extraction from the page.
Generates related topics
The Query is your BFF!
e.g. http://yboss.yahooapis.com/ysearch/web?q=“Dark Knight”&format=xml

9. SAMPLE CALLS
Getting multiple data sets
 /ysearch/web,images,news?q=obama
 /ysearch/web,images,news?web.q=obama&images.q=flower&news.q=egypt
Searching through sites
 A Simple Movie Search
 /ysearch/web?q=“Dark Knight”&
sites=movies.yahoo.com,netflix.com,imdb.com
AND/OR operators
 /ysearch/web?q="steve
jobs"AND((ipad)OR(iphone))&sites=bestbuy.com,newegg.com

10. UNARY OPERATORS
Search for Batman but not “Dark Knight”
 q=(batman -“Dark Knight")
Find pages with “Heath Ledger” but not “Dark
Knight”
 q=+”heath ledger”–”Dark
Knight”&sites=movies.yahoo.com

11. OUTPUT

12. IMAGE SEARCH PARAMETERS
Search for images that are not offensive
 /ysearch/images?q=“san francisco”&filter=yes
Search for images that are wallpaper size
 /ysearch/images?q=“san francisco”&dimensions=wallpaper
Search for a image at a certain refer URL
 /ysearch/images?q=yahoo&refererurl=http://www.flickr.com
Interesting Output Fields
 format, file size, height, width, title, total result count

13. NEWS SEARCH PARAMETERS
Search news that is less than 7 days old
/ysearch/news? q=osama&age=7d
Search news that is between 20hrs and 2 days old
/ysearch/news?q=osama&age=20h2d
Re-rank news results by date
/ysearch/news?q=osama&ranking=true
Interesting Output Fields
Source, Date, Source URL

14. BOSS + YQL
Table Name: boss.search
e.g. select * from boss.search where ck=… and
secret=… and q=„yahoo‟ and service=„news‟
Parameters Example
Consumer Key ck -
Consumer Secret secret -
Query Term q ‘yahoo’
Service service ‘news’

15. UNDERSTAND OAUTH
Identification
Consumer Key – Used to make a call to the API
Consumer Secret – Used for 3 legged oAuth (not used for BOSS)
Making a call
(www.oauth.net/code)
-Consumer Key
-Nonce – Random string generated by oAuth (prevents replay attacks)
-Signature – Generated by library
-Signature Method – Various types of methods supported (e.g. HMAC-SHA1)
-oAuth Timestamp –Unix time (valid for 5 minutes only)
-oAuth version – 1.0
We have code samples in most languages on BOSS Site

16. HACK IDEAS AND USEFUL API’S
RealTime
 Twitter/Facebook API
Mobile Applications
Video
 YouTube data API
Vertical search engines
 Programmable web has interesting API‟s
Local + Search
 Pull entities using Placespotter and
recognize relationships between content
Chrome extensions

17. HACK AWAY
1. We have BOSS Keys available for you
 Find me if you don’t have them
2. Code samples in the BOSS Docs
3. In depth demo later today
 Build a location aware news service
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18. HACK AWAY!!
Rahul Hampole
Sr Product Manager Yahoo! BOSS
rhampole@yahoo-inc.com
@ysearchboss