Using Yahoo's BOSS API to Search The Web | Blog

Using Yahoo’s BOSS API to Search The Web

July 21, 2008 | Shea Frederick

Early last week Yahoo announced they had released a new search API dubbed "BOSS" for "Build your Own Search Service" - wow, snazzy name. So being the explorer that I am, I started to play with it and poke around in the API - hold on! this is just the same search API service they offered up a while ago - what gives?

Benefits of the new Program

Turns out that BOSS comes without the limitations imposed on their previous search API. This gives everyone the ability to take Yahoo's search result and re-use them in any way they want. No branding needed, no restrictions on how you are able re-format or merge the information, and no limit on the number of queries you can run.

They provide data for the following categories:

Web
News
Images
Spelling

The Job at Hand

So with my new-found knowledge of Yahoo's guilt-free data, I put together a panel that displays the data, allowing integration of custom searches into a single interface. The searches run using BOSS to acquire web, news, and image results from Yahoo. Data is displayed in a DataView, with each result formatted to my liking using a custom template. Results can be paged, and the ComboBox in the paging bar can be used to switch between search services in this example. Communication between ExtJS and Yahoo is done via a server side proxy, which also handles some data cleanup. This was fairly simple to accomplish - the Yahoo BOSS group even has some user contributed classes to use. I ended up implementing the PHP class posted by Jake. They also provide a callback feature so the data store could be populated without having to use a server side proxy.

Summary

In this example used to display BOSS results, a few form fields provide the functionality that allows searching. Results are displayed using DataView with a paging toolbar. I enabled template swapping based on the type of search that's performed - that way image results are displayed two wide and web search results display in single rows. The source files for this experiment can be found here and the live demo here. Play around with BOSS in your ExtJS applications! The possible uses of BOSS are endless.

There are 20 responses. Add yours.

Deepak Nadar

4 years ago

Very nice implementation. Thanks for sharing…

Robert C

Is Ext+BOSS the next big search engine? Could be! Be nice to see how far the Ext team takes it.

Frank

Excellent news!

lily

cool

Kiran

Woww!! The feature is Awesome, I Hope ExtJS and BOSS will be a great combination in the search applications…

Ahmad

Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a life.

Gogus Estetigi

3 years ago

Bookmarks about Api

[...] - bookmarked by 2 members originally found by extranjerochapin on 2009-03-06 Using Yahoo’s BOSS API to Search The Web http://extjs.com/blog/2008/07/21/using-yahoos-boss-api-to-search-the-web/ - bookmarked by 5 [...]

medyum

nice article.this post nice.
thank you…
Medyum

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http://extjs.com/blog/2008/06/02/ext-gwt-v10-beta-4-released/

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Siki?

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2 years ago

[...] Shea is also an author for JavaScript Magazine, his own blog (http://vinylfox.com), and the Ext JS blog. He is the lead author of the Learning Ext JS book and is the organizer for the Baltimore JavaScript [...]

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BilelExtjs

Well nice work, it’s really awesome!!! i just tried it and it works perfectly.

Sefi

1 year ago

I am about to start designing a blog cataloging system and I was after a web service that would provide me with the right sort of feed…after reading this article it looks like the BOSS API will be the right one.

Roger

Until now I believed that Google Custom Search API is a very user friendly and well supported platform to incorporate custom search result into my site. Having read through your article I decided to have a quick look on this BOSS stuff and I was very much surprised in a positive way. BOSS API is well documented, easy to implement and gives you as good result as its major competitors! I think I will just leave GCS API and implement BOSS instead…
Thanks for the article Shea!!!

Charles

Kind of a cool and easy way to search the web, but personally I like the standard way. Although not seeing ads is a plus!

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