Yahoo is announcing several changes to its Search BOSS service, which lets developers incorporate web results from Yahoo’s main search index into their own web apps. The biggest of these changes intends to transform one of Yahoo’s most innovative projects into a real business.
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. The pricing scheme is also backed by a newly introduced service level agreement.
Yahoo plans to start charging for BOSS in late second quarter of this year. Will the service actually start making money for the company then? It’s hard to say since Yahoo won’t divulge how many developers use BOSS in production or how many queries they each generate per day. All we know is that Yahoo BOSS, on the whole, reached 10 million queries per day this past December.
For Yahoo to make no money even after the pricing scheme goes into effect, it would have to have enticed over 1,000 developers, each making no more than 10,000 queries per day. There’s a decent chance that this will indeed be the case, since 10,000 is a fairly high number of queries (our entire blog network here at TechCrunch generates only a few thousand queries per day). Yahoo is still in the phase of attracting developers to its first real web services business, so it makes sense to keep things free for most users. But the company may very well be forced to lower the free queries threshold later on in order to produce a substantial return on its investment.
The upside to this new SLA for developers is that they’re given complete freedom to run any advertisements they want alongside the web results they pull from Yahoo. There may have been an effort on Yahoo’s part to generate a return on BOSS through advertising, but somewhere this idea must have been dropped in favor of giving developers the freedom to shop for ads anywhere they want. Placing a restriction on the advertisements that partners could run would have imposed its own enforcement costs as well.
To offset the (mostly downer) news that’s Yahoo’s going to begin charging its most demanding developers, the company is simultaneously announcing a few technical upgrades to BOSS. The same semantic markup used by SearchMonkey, the tool used by site owners to customize the way their pages show up in Yahoo’s results, will now be included in the XML returned by BOSS. The example below shows how extra information marked up on a LinkedIn profile page (in RDF or microformat) will be sent alongside normal results data.
The BOSS API is also being amended to allow for longer abstracts (developers can now request 300 characters instead of the standard 170). And the Site Explorer API is getting rolled into BOSS so that developers can more easily retrieve data about inbound links to their pages.
Disclosure: Yahoo BOSS powers TechCrunch’s own search engine, and I personally worked with the Yahoo team to get it up and running.
The new CEO really gets this whole business thing – make money!
They probably thought of monetizing BOSS before Carol Bartz became CEO.
No, she doesn’t get it. Yahoo’s stupidity never ceases to amaze me. Let me elaborate.
I personally thought BOSS was an awesome step in the right direction. Because it was free and their were no limits, developers were open to use Yahoo as a backbone in creative ways for their own search technologies. I thought it was genius because all they had to do was incorporate their paid ads into the feeds, keep it free, and require that developers have to show the paid listings to keep using the API. Heck, even cut the developers in on the revenue and you got yourself a cash machine.
Well these new limits only serve 1 purpose. Any developer that is going to hit above the limit, can EASILY switch their app to scrape the Yahoo results they need. In the developer world, you can’t bite the hand that feeds you. You HAVE to give positive encouragement to use your services because it is just too easy for developers to do a run around your requirements.
Once again, a “brilliant” move by Yahoo. As an advertiser that spends in the six figures with Yahoo Search Marketing each month and unfortunately have to work closely with the company, believe me when I say that this company succeeds despite itself.
I don’t know whether this effort will succeed for Yahoo–I’m hopeful but mostly skeptical. But this isn’t a bait and switch. Yahoo warned developers from day one that they eventually planned to charge. And scraping isn’t plausible–Yahoo could block the offending IP address.
Don’t like it? Don’t use it. It’s a free country.
http://thenoisy...boss-aint-free/
Of course this is bait and switch …
Do you think anyone would build a service around Yahoo search if they had to pay for it?
Yahoo has a third tier search product. The whole purpose of the open innovation initiative that Vik at Yahoo championed was to use the innovation of developers to help make that into a much better product.
Well it seems like it was succeeding. 300 million queries per month is not anything to laugh at. This are new queries that Yahoo could not have generated on their own.
Now new management thinks that by screwing developer community, they will succeed even more?
Please.
If they entered into revenue or ad sharing agreements with their developers they could at least make the developers happy. Instead, all the developers will leave and they will never trust Yahoo again.
One more good Yahoo initiative completely destroyed by bad management.
It seems like BOSS developers are already up in arms about this. The Yahoo BOSS developers groups seems on the brink of staging a mass revolt:
http://tech.gro...up/ysearchboss/
OMG, this is an open revolution we have got here.
Reading the developer forum, I think Yahoo will really need to reconsider this decision. This was really badly handled and a stupid move. The last thing Yahoo needs right now is the destruction of one of their few products where they were showing some innovation.
The 300 million additional queries that their developers were able to innovate on were 300 million queries that were not going to Google. By screwing around their developer community, they are just digging their own grave.
Propose an ad share or something. My goodness it is not that hard.
Rigt now Yahoo comes off as just evil.
Yahoo is still focusing on search? Really?
Actually I find through Yahoo the most important sites in which I’m interesting regarding my business
Why not? They have marketshare. They may not be as huge as Google, but millions of people still use Yahoo Search. (Plus, the BOSS API is wicked. Google doesn’t have anything remotely like it anymore…)
Capitalism is all about competition. Competition is what drives innovation. If you let one company have a virtual monopoly over something, you end up with Microsoft or Exxon/Mobil.
By innovating in the search field, they may gain more marketshare, and they will also spur Google to keep innovating, to stay ahead.
but y! has never been even at parity with g on search. marketshare, revenue share, and droves of anecdotal evidence bears this out. i don’t see how opening up 10k a day free queries really changes this. as for companies like techcrunch that have trivial search needs, nutch or sphinx would just as easily get the job done.
It’s an interesting plan but they may have to lower the threshold to turn a profit.
The old bait and switch tactic …
Anjali sen
Unbelievable.
Just when you thought Yahoo could not display more incompetence.
This is definitely not the way manage developers … telling them something will be free and then after they have spent time and resources building applications, then saying sorry we changed our mind.
What Yahoo needs to do is to grandfather all the agreements. So if a developer signed onto BOSS before this anouncement, the old terms would apply. Otherwise they will just have a lot of pissed off developers on their hands.
Anjali Sen
Yes, and the negative effect is going to hit them not just for current developers. As someone who is not currently relying on their APIs, I can now say that I will stay far, far away from any of their future “free” API offerings unless there is a very good reason not to.
Each developer knows that eventually each major API will be either capped or monetized…
Every*
This is just idiotic. Yahoo needs all the help they can get.
No the Yahoo api was released as a free API, that is why early developers got on board. Do you think people would spend any time on this if it was paid? Why the hell would anyone use Yahoo?
Now they are pissing off the only supporters they have.
Good and potential businesses for Yahoo! . We all know that is is not easy to build an own and effective search engine for enterprise scale.
wow. hundreds of millions spent in infrastructure and development, and all they get is a pennies-a-day monetization model.
panama has more or less failed…the point was to utilize search to generate somewhere in the range of a billion a year in profit off of search ads…
selling BOSS for pennies won’t turn around the losing proposition of yahoo search. every month the market moves more towards a google monoculture not only in search use, but search ad revenue.
i have to imagine that once bartz sees the huge costs for yahoo search relative to its shrinking marketshare and poor ad performance, she will recant her earlier statements and indeed sell it off the msft
Will it do well is the question… hmmmmmm. Everyone wants everything free now days.
If Yahoo! can’t effectively monetize off its’ own search index, what makes them think someone else can?
The CPM of Yahoo Boss is $ 0.30… So your ads have to generate at least $ 0.30 to break even (if q > 10.000).
With the targeting and relevance that Adsense ads offer to your search results… you should be able to at least make over a dollar worth of CPM… leaving you with 70 % profits…:)
Melvin are you stupid?
Have you ever used Adsense? 1 dollar of CPM from Adsense? What planet are you from?
Walter – You are thinking of Adsense for Content. Adsense for Search does incredibly well. These are ads based on the query, not the text on the page – which is notoriously iffy.
Google monetizes at like $50-$60 rpm. I’m sure the search engines people are building with BOSS can do $10. That’s an insane margin. Random blogs get <$1 cpm from Adsense for Content, but no one should be using BOSS to power a blog.
Yahoo’s approach of asking site owners to markup their site is very difficult to scale.
At Cazoodle, we have developed automated tools to do that accurately, yet at large scale. The result, is truly Web-scale structured vertical search. Try and let us know your thoughts.
http://apartments.cazoodle.com
Yup, pretty tough to scale. That must be why we have 1.5 *billion* URLs with hcard alone.
http://us.searc...o.page.uf.hcard
what’s the big deal of so much negatives? if you like the service, and your service is generating more than 10,000 queries, pay for it.
If you do generate 10,000 queries already, you probably already own a serious web business, and you would not mind to pay a few extra dollars.
it is just like google apps, i don’t see people complain too much about $50 subscription fee.
It’s because they tricked the developers.
They promised a truly open API with almost no rules and limitations. Now they are just spitting in the face of the developers that invested their time and energy believing the BS.
If they offer pricing to new developers that sign on after their new pricing plan, that is fine, but this is insulting and wrong.
Anjali Sen
Smart Babes is right. This is like you signing up to Google mail and then having all of your contacts and sending out your email to everyone and then after 2 years, when you have become quasi dependent on the service, then Google suddenly saying, now we will charge you $1 per email sent and received, and $50 for every mb of storage.
This is a bait and switch.
Compare this to how Google handled it. They have been offering Google Apps for free. When people initially signed up, they could have 100 email accounts or more for free. Later, Google decided to change the model so that more people would pay for the service.
BUT GOOGLE DID NOT RETROACTIVELY CHARGE THE PEOPLE WHO HAD SIGNED UP UNDER THE OLD PROPOSAL.
Instead they changed it so that any new people signing up would be subject to the new pricing.
This is the right way to do it.
Yahoo’s developers have a right to feel pissed off, and Yahoo needs to do the right thing here.
Bil
Funny, if you read the BOSS site, it says that “Search APIs are nothing new, but typically they’ve included rate limits, strict terms of service regarding the re-ordering and presentation of results, and provided little or no opportunity for monetization. These constraints have limited the innovation and commercial viability of new search solutions….BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is different; it’s a truly open API with as few rules and limitations as possible.”
Basically, this is back to the old Yahoo Search API, with slightly less restrictive terms.
It’s Yahoo!’s “first” web services business? Maybe this has been Yahoo!’s problem all along: never realizing the are a web services business. Or maybe we always expected them to be…
Though, I like the idea they’re setting prices. Because when you’re getting whooped in the SE markets, the first thing you want to do is raise prices (or in this case, go from FREE to a price).
Has Microsoft bought them out yet?
Why would anyone use Yahoo API now? They can just use Google’s.
What a stupid move from Yahoo. This company deserves to go bankrupt.
@Bilbao Google limits you to 1,000 queries per day.
I’m really excited by this.
Are we looking at the same pricing chart up top? The model is based on the number of queries and query type — not the number of results returned. Based on taht chart, if your site is making 10k API calls a day it is a pretty high volume site. Read: You are making $$$$$$$$. Plus units are only 10 cents each AND each developer gets 30 units PER DAY for free. FREE. Do the math before complaining. Jeez!
BAIT AND SWITCH
From Wikipedia
In retail sales, a bait and switch is a form of fraud in which the party putting forth the fraud lures in customers by advertising a product or service at an unprofitably low price, then reveals to potential customers that the advertised good is not available but that a substitute is.
The goal of the bait-and-switch is to convince some buyers to purchase the substitute good as a means of avoiding disappointment over not getting the bait, or as a way to recover sunk costs expended to try to obtain the bait.
Other advertising practices, such as the use of sales techniques to steer customers away from low-profit items, depend on many of the same psychological mechanisms as a bait and switch.
Some employers use bait-and-switch tactics in advertising job openings, by giving false or misleading descriptions of working conditions or compensation packages.
Mona, why are you defending such scummy practices? THIS IS A CLASSIC BAIT AND SWITCH. THIS IS A SCUMMY DIRTY TACTIC. IT IS WRONG.
This is not a scummy practice in any way. Who do you think Yahoo is? Facebook or Twitter? Yahoo needs to monetize to further develop a product you’ve built a business on for profit in order to keep bettering it. What is wrong with that?
As for the Bait and Switch thing everyone here is harping on, the last I checked Yahoo is 1) not retail 2) not using sales techniques to steer customers away from low-profit items. You ‘customers’ are using this product for FREE to make money for YOURSELVES.
Like I said in my original comment, take another look at the chart on top. It clearly shows the pricing model is based on the number of queries and query type — not the number of results returned. Units are 10 cents each AND every developer gets 30 units PER DAY for free. FREE. Based on that chart, if your site is making 10k API calls a day it is a pretty high volume site. Read: You are profiting. Period.
All of you guys need to do the math before crying out for a revolution.
Ridiculous.
This is fantastic for us. We have a real *business* based on web search, and are more than happy to start paying for BOSS in exchange for an SLA. This pricing leaves plenty of room for us to make a profit, and I expect we’ll shortly be sending a few $100k/yr Yahoo’s way.
Bob
Are you blind?
Don’t you see that just when you think you will be making a profit and after you have developed all of your services and made yourself developent on Yahoo, they will then raise prices even more and squeeze your ass?
Don’t you see that this is what the developers are up in arms about?
It is called bait and switch. The oldest scam in the book. You are just too blind to see it.
There is a sucker born every minute. When you don’t know who the sucker is, it is probably you.
Monica
Monica,
Yahoo don’t know my margins, so how will they know how far to squeeze me? Anyway they can’t charge me more than anyone else, since I can always just sign up as a new user. That’s the point of open pricing.
Yahoo will charge based on what the *market* can bear, not my particular company. If I have a business that makes a large profit based on that, I’m home dry.
This bait-and-switch stuff is nonsense. Yahoo was always clear that they would eventually charge for this. Anyone who built a service/business on BOSS while ignoring that fact was foolish.
Bob
Amen to Bob! People love a controversy, but I really don’t see one here.
These are fair prices with plenty of room to make $. Search is the best monetization engine in the history of software – Google makes a $50 cpm. I think you can pay a $0.30 cpm and go get Adsense for Search.
Bob at least understands how pricing works. It based on value to the customer. Developers pay for AWS. Will could they raise prices? Sure, but people would build things in-house or go elsewhere. There’s incentive for AMZN to do so – and in this case YHOO.
If you think BOSS is expensive try going out and crawling, scoring, deduping, ranking, de-spaming, etc 50B websites yourself.
Thank you for being one of the few folks here who seems to have a rational attitude towards basic economics. And, to reiterate to everyone crying “bait and switch”, Yahoo made clear on *day 1* that they eventually planned to charge for BOSS.
Anyone wants to know what yahoo is focused on? Check out the URL above.
Anyone wants to know what yahoo is focused on? Check out the URL below.
omg.yahoo dot com
Well, I’d prefer to hear about some sort of innovation (or victory) in the search arena, but I guess 100% of their employees can’t all work on that…..
few things:
a) Did anyone really think this service can be for free?
b) If yahoo forced you to use their ads, on the same forum people will crib out how they dont want to use yahoo’s ads. And why should yahoo pay for your site not being able to monetize well?
c) I am surprised no one is talking about caching the search results. I don’t see yahoo not allowing caching in TOS. so if your site generates more than 10k queries, there are bound to be lot of duplicate queries, just have a caching scheme.
dk is one of the few people making sense here.
- It is clearly stated in the TOS that you are allowed to cache as long as you maintain control of the cache.
- It clearly states in the TOS from day one that Yahoo reserves the right to charge fees and/or require you to take ads. People, don’t you read? Bait and switch? Maybe if you had the foresight of dog.
- You can go get ads from anywhere. I’m sure if they required you to take their ads you would complain about how restricted it is. Search ads do in the $10-$50 rpm range. Everyone knows Yahoo ads don’t perform as well as Google, so now you are not tied to them. Pay the reasonable fee and go make a killing.