Yahoo! Search Boss at Alt Search Engines 03 2009

Yahoo! Confidential

Bill Michels

GM & Sr. Director Open Search Platform

[email protected]

Yahoo! Confidential

Reality of Search Huge Barriers of Entry

• Three players dominate the market, giving users limited choice • Becoming a serious Search principal requires a massive capital

investment and access to top technical talent

– Approximately $300M in cap-ex commitment – People, knowledge, experience – Hardware, operations, and infrastructure – Data, relevance and ranking models

Yahoo! Confidential

Fantastic Business Model Ripe for Innovation

• The economics of Search are the healthiest on the Internet, arguably in the history of software

– Growth continues: Google Search revenue will surpass Microsoft Windows revenue in early 2009

– Monopoly-like margins: Search margins are greater than Windows margins – +75%

– Concentration of Wealth: By 2009, half of the world’s online advertising is expected to flow through Google’s systems

• At the same time Search is prime for innovation– Social graphs and user insights can be leveraged to develop new relevance models– Semantic technology can improve upon query intent and page information– New presentation frameworks can revolutionize how material is surfaced– Clustering algorithms can aggregate and display similar themes together– Social tagging and bookmarking can be indicators of relevance

The Yahoo! BOSS Offeringsuge

API

A self-service, web services model to access Yahoo’s various search indexes:

• University of Illinois Urbana Champaign• Carnegie Mellon University

• Stanford

• Purdue University

Vertical Lens

Highly customized and tuned vertical & niche search engines:

Academic

Working with the following universities to allow for wide-scale research in the search field:

Yahoo! Confidential

• Web Search (w/ Index data)

• Image Search

• News Search

• Spelling

• Site Explorer

• Indexing of 3rd party structured data

• White list of URLs – up millions

• Blending of structured data and Web data

(Currently not self-serve)

Yahoo! Confidential

BOSS API

Terms that allow users to:

• Re-rank results• Blend results/content

sources• Use any monetization

platform• Access unlimited queries• Present results in any way• Brand their products in any

way

Features/Data:

• Web/Image/News/Spelling• Key Terms (from Search

Assist)• SearchMonkey Structured

Data• Expanded Abstracts• Page data from Search Exp.• 40+ lang/region pairs• Porn/Adult filtering• Mashup Framework

• Platform for intelligently building and blending three corpuses– Partner structured data, white-list of URLs, and Web search index

• Structured data features– Real time indexing of partner data– Control of schema and refiners– Protection and isolation of data– Custom tuning of results

• White-list of URLs– Partner defined portion of Web search index – Ability to include top-level domains, individual URLs, wild cards– URL count can be in millions

INTERNET

All crawled, ranked and presented in a

single API

Partner Related URLS

Partner Structured Data

Yahoo! Confidential

BOSS Vertical Lens

Yahoo! Confidential

Sorting options

Refiners- Property- # of comments- Author

Native branding & presentation style

Structured data- Comments- Author - Date

Shortcuts

YSM Ads

Vertical Lens Implementation

BOSS Economics

Yahoo! Confidential

• BOSS is offered as a web services model – Developers pay based on the volume of queries and type of query– Query type are determined by the depth of results and index vertical– Developers are free to use third party advertising products with BOSS– Fees will be introduced in May

• In lieu of fees option for Yahoo Search ads with a revenue share– Must meet certain volume requirements– Self-serve version of coming

Units cost $0.10 (per 1000 API calls)

What can be built with the BOSS API?

New presentation models

What can be built with the BOSS API?

Client / Browser integrations

What can be built with the BOSS API?

New ranking models

What can be built with the BOSS API?

Vertical/niche search products