boss
DESCRIPTION
Slides for Rahul Hampole's BOSS talk for Yahoo! Hack Europe: London 2013.TRANSCRIPT
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.
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?
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)
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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
meaningLearn more at http://developer.yahoo.com/boss/geo/
HOW DO I HACK WITH IT?
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
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
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
AND OR
OUTPUT
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
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
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’
UNDERSTAND OAUTH
IdentificationConsumer 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
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
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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
