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Sales Force Automation Comparison Guide

Businesses of all sizes can benefit by automating all aspects of their sales processes with an SFA (Sales Force Automation) solution. But due to the sheer number of features that most SFA solutions...Read More

Which CMS Is Right For Me?

If you're wondering which CMS is the right one for your organization, this comprehensive guide will take you through the various options available, detailing the pros and cons of each. Download...Read More

How to Buy a Phone System

Considering a new phone system for your business? The Phone System Buyer's Guide from VoIP-News provides you with all of the information you need to make a more informed decision. The Guide helps you...Read More

Oracle Magazine

Oracle Magazine contains technology strategy articles, sample code, tips, Oracle and partner news, how to articles for developers and DBAs, and more. Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is the world's largest...Read More

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Yahoo’s BOSS Search Mashups

Last month Yahoo! announced BOSS, its Build Your Own Search Service, which "allows developers and companies to create and launch web-scale search products by utilizing the same infrastructure and technology that powers Yahoo! Search." The REST API allows developers to get results in XML or JSON format for web, news, and image search queries. Recently the official Yahoo! Search Blog showcased a handful of the best mashups that third-party developers created in BOSS's first month of operation.

The most visually interesting is the Java-based Tianamo, which uses Java to plot search keywords on a dynamically-generated 3D terrain. Clicking on the terrain will let you navigate through related topics while search results are displayed on the right (our Tianamo mashup profile).

4hoursearch, below, is so named because, developer Sam Pullara says, “It took 4 hours to write the initial code, 4 hours for it to go from unknown to 20 hits / second, 4 hours looking for a domain name and 4 hours to build the brand new UI. Fortunately, it won’t take 4 hours to find something with it.” More at our 4 hour search profile.

The Yahoo! Search Blog neglects to mention that it was originally named Yuil and conceived as a parody of recent search start-up Cuil; regardless, 4hoursearch is a great mashup.

Next is sports search engine PlayerSearch, which pulls in links, news, photos and videos from all over the web. Unfortunately for Yahoo! it’s the AOL Video-powered video ticker at the top of the results that steals the spotlight from the static BOSS-powered web search results below, but it still shows how BOSS fits into a larger mashup ecosystem (our Player Search mashup profile).

Finally there’s NewsLine, which we mentioned in our coverage of Dipity’s interactive timeline API last week. NewsLine uses BOSS to gather news headlines based on keywords entered and puts them on a scrollable, zoomable timeline with the Dipity API. Their example pits John McCain headlines against Barack Obama’s on stacked timelines:

With this batch of four fresh BOSS mashups Yahoo! succeeds in showing that the fledgling API can be used to produce widely varying search experiences.

CRM and social networking...

I was quoted in Computing the other week making somewhat unsupportive remarks about the CRM vendor’s attempts to harness social networking. In essence my feelings are that companies need to understand the impact of social networking rather than...

Declaration of Independence - SaaS Version

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the Internet, the separate and equal station to which the laws of...