Tag Archives: Yahoo

Yahoo Claims They Aren’t Shutting Down Del.icio.us After All

Dec 20, 2010 by Matt | Posted in Social Media No Comments

Yahoo put out a new post on the Del.icio.us blog stating that, despite all indications otherwise, they will not be closing down the bookmarking service. They may have fired all of the site’s staff and included it on an internal slide as being “sunset,” but no, apparently the site isn’t being killed. Though they will most likely be selling it.

Is Delicious being shut down? And should I be worried about my data?

– No, we are not shutting down Delicious. While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive.

Obviously this is good news. Perhaps we will see something along the lines of Skype’s buyback happen, where the service’s original founders bought the company back from eBay for less than they sold it for. So long as Kevin Rose doesn’t buy it, Delicious should probably be all right. (But I would still recommend backing up your bookmarks, just to be safe.)

Yahoo is Shutting Down Del.icio.us

Dec 17, 2010 by Matt | Posted in Social Media 5 Comments

According to TechCrunch, Yahoo has fired the entire staff of the Delicious social bookmarking service and will be shutting it down shortly. (Along with Altavista and MyBlogLog.) They will also be closing Yahoo Buzz and some of their API services.

Yahoo acquired Del.icio.us back in 2005, and has done little with it. They haven’t run ads on the site or really made any apparent effort to monetize the service. And instead of, I don’t know, selling the service to someone who could make it profitable, they decide to just shut it all down. (Let’s not forget that a meticulously-tagged index of links and their popularity is a wonderful mine of data that advertisers and publishers would love to be able to get metrics from.)

Suffice to say, I am majorly unhappy about this. I have been a Del.icio.us user for years, and have over 2,500 tagged bookmarks stored in the service. Yahoo is suddenly yanking the rug out from under users who have been depending on the service for years. We would gladly put up with ads, or maybe even premium plans. But no, Yahoo is just saying “screw you” to everyone.

Yahoo is dead to me. One by one they are closing the few services that are worth anything. (I assume Flickr and the wonderful BOSS Search API can’t be too far behind?) The services that they are keeping around are things like their vapid content offerings and underwhelming webmail application. They are still stuck in the ’90s, and they are blatantly disregarding the assets that are their most valuable.

Anyway, be sure to export your Delicious bookmarks as soon as possible so you don’t lose them when the site closes. Find an alternative service or simply import them into your web browser’s bookmarking tool.

Update: Yahoo has announced that they will not be shutting Delicious down after all.

Yahoo Monetizes Yahoo BOSS

Feb 13, 2009 by Matt | Posted in Services and Tools 2 Comments

Yahoo is currently readying the next major update to it’s BOSS Search API. With it they will bring access to SearchMonkey data, optional longer abstracts, and greater flexibility for monetization. They will also be tracking API usage, and charging nominally for monthly usage greater than 10,000 queries.

Since launch, the BOSS API has been provided entirely for free. Now Yahoo is putting in place a freemium model where it’ll be free only for developers who generate fewer than 10,000 queries per day. After that, a tiered pricing model will kick in that charges for BOSS as if it were a utility (think AWS). Rates will vary depending on the type of query (web result vs. spelling correction, for example), how many results the developer wants returned per query (with a new maximum of 1000 results), and just how far the developer goes over the free queries cap. (Source: TechCrunch)

It seems reasonable, and Yahoo certainly is improving upon the service. Ten thousand queries for month is a pretty fair ceiling in my opinion. It’s plenty for experimentation or development, or even a web app of reasonably small size.

If Yahoo can leverage BOSS to save themselves from possible bankruptcy, and still have a unique and powerful service, that’s definitely fine by me.

Now pay attention Google: You dumped your API back in 2006, and it’s going to come back to haunt you unless you follow Yahoo’s lead. After a long draught, Yahoo’s getting their game back on, and they’re out to with the developers over with all of their tools.

Yahoo BOSS Search “Vertical Lense”

Nov 30, 2008 by Matt | Posted in Services and Tools No Comments

Remember Yahoo’s BOSS Search API? Well, they’re not done with it yet. A new expansion to the service has just launched, though it is currently available only to “certain Yahoo! partners,” with a promise that it will eventually become part of the main BOSS API.

The new service is called “Vertical Lense Technology.” It allows for topical search engines to be created. These search engines, as seen on TechCrunch, the only site to use the service so far, can

  • Index the partner site in real-time. Whenever a post or comment is added, it’s sent to Yahoo to be instantly indexed.
  • Allow ranking tweaks. When you search on TechCrunch, you are shown a carefully adjusted mix of web and Crunch Network results, ordered in a way that hopefully fits their audience.

TechCrunch describes their experiences with Vertical Lense on their website.

Since we publish using WordPress, supplying our data using the first API essentially required that we design and deploy a plugin that would send information to Yahoo’s servers every time there was a new post or comment on any of our blogs. We also needed to create a similar data indexing system for CrunchBase so that contributions there would show up in the results as well. To ensure that all of our archived content was incorporated in the search index, we supplied Yahoo with historical data dumps from all 10 sites. Perhaps needless to say, this took a considerable amount of time just to ensure that the data we indexed at Yahoo was accurate and complete.

You can read more about this on the Yahoo Search Blog.

Now, when can I get one of these? :D

Sikbox – Live Search Made Easy

Oct 10, 2008 by Matt | Posted in Services and Tools 2 Comments

“Live Search” is a term that people started using somewhere along the line to refer to AJAX-y search forms that display results as you type, rather than taking you to a results page. Kind of like Apple’s Spotlight search in OSX, which I have to say works great.

Wouldn’t it be cool to have something like that on your blog? A search form that, as you type, displays the results in a dropdown instead of a results page? That’s where Sikbox comes in.

Sikbox is a Yahoo BOSS app that allows you to create a cut and paste live search solution. It’s free, easy to install, and you can even apply your own CSS styles to it (or pick from one of the pre-made themes). You can search the entire web with it, or limit it to your website, like most of us would probably do.

Here’s a screenshot of it in action:

If you click on one results, you jump right to it. It works pretty good. It seems to work a lot better than the default WordPress search system too (providing your blog is in the Yahoo index).

The BOSS Mashable Challenge

Sep 21, 2008 by Matt | Posted in Coding No Comments

A couple months ago, Yahoo released a promising new search API called Yahoo Search BOSS. It allows you to query results from Yahoo’s servers and display them how you want, reordering them even. No hard query limis are in place either. It’s pretty awesome.

Well, if you’ve got some l33t coding skills, Yahoo has a challenge for you. Mashable and Yahoo are partnering to bring you the BOSS Mashable Challenge. You have until September 28 to build an amazing search mashup using the BOSS API.

The BOSS Mashable Challenge pits developer against developer to compete for the grand prize of $2,000 and an article on Mashable about your winning entry. How do you win? Build a kickass mashup – search engine or any other Web app – using the BOSS API and any other data sources/technologies.

The public will vote on the submissions to see who gets the grand prize and who the runner up is.

Sounds like a lot of fun, and I bet we’ll see some cool web apps come out of this.

Yahoo BOSS API

Jul 16, 2008 by Matt | Posted in Coding, Featured 49 Comments

Yahoo BOSSYahoo recently released a new search API. Known as Yahoo BOSS, for “Build your Own Searcg Service,” the API allows you to query search results from their servers, format them however you want, mash the data up with other services, and even re-order results. You get “Unlimited*” queries (they just reserve “the right to limit unintended usage, such as automated querying by bots”) and they don’t even require attribution.

Even though I’m what you could possibly call a “Google/Apple fanboy” (though you would be advised to not say such things…), and I’ve long dismissed Yahoo as boring, geared towards web newbies, among other things, I have to admit, this is a great API. Google never gave us anything like this (despite their seemingly unlimited resources) and they discontinued their fairly limited search API. (As a side note, I also admit that Yahoo owns some great web services, such as Flickr and Del.icio.us.)

I’ve already got to work playing with the API, creating a sort of search mashup. I figured I’d share a little bit of code, and show you how to create a basic SERP. Be warned, the following requires PHP5 and some cURL black magic. (If you have no idea what I just said, read a book, and come back later.)

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Yahoo Buzz: Not a “Digg Killer”

Mar 20, 2008 by Matt | Posted in Social Media One Comment

Everyone seems to be talking about Yahoo Buzz these days, and about how it’s going to give Digg a run for its money.

I don’t get it.

Sure, the site is new and shiny. But they have nothing on Digg so far.

  • Users of Yahoo Buzz can only vote on stories, they cannot submit them.
  • Only select sites can have their articles featured (read: really big blogs). Yahoo says they are in beta, and are currently not accepting publisher applications.
  • I doubt Yahoo will ever let smaller sites be featured. They’ll most likely keep it weighted towards the bigger sites, with some lame excuse like “all the traffic would kill your site!”

I admit that the potential traffic from Yahoo Buzz is great. As Daily Blog Tips pointed out:

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