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BOSS! No we aren’t addressing your employer but Yahoo’s latest project launched Wednesday night that allows you to create your own customized search engine upon Internet Company’s technology. The service will be in its public beta testing. And the acronym stands for (Build Your Own Search Service). BOSS allows users to build your Website with a search box that lets you pass queries to it, processing results that are thrown in by Yahoo’s search engines and hola! The results are there on your screen.

So what is the deal behind BOSS? The service is an attempt to let others make big on their search innovation and then reap profits from the results that are displayed. We salute Yahoo for letting in some air into its carcass by taking this important step regarding its Open Strategy; something that lets developers outside Yahoo put to practice their technical expertise making this effort a major part of the Web.

The API is free to use, but those BOSS partners that do good with the service will be required to display search ads. Prabhakar Raghavan, Chief strategist for Yahoo Search added:

There is no payment of any kind we expect from partners, but we do say in the terms of service up front that over time we will require them as they build and grow out to use our search advertising.

Now does that mean Yahoo is shifting gears to initiate its long run to pace out Google, despite facing immense pressure from the likes of shareholders, attempts by Microsoft to gobble up Yahoo and then Yahoo teaming up with Google for the search ad-deal. The list of all these events show Yahoo’s topsy turvy walk on the Web line; but this present attempt somehow seems to be a welcome step to get Yahoo going on the track it once was on (ages back ????).

So what exactly has called onto BOSS already and what is Yahoo’s say about it attracting consumers? We here think that offering such a service for free and with an added option of offering Yahoo’s own technology (even hardware) to build user-customized search engines. Sites that have already sprung at biting the BOSS are the social search site Me.dium and Hakia, a natural language processing site.

And how can one forget not mentioning the idea of BOSS attracting entrepreneurs and researchers alike with partnerships being extended to the likes of MIT, Stanford University and the Indian Institute of Technology with a countless other names buried within the company’s Pandora’s box.

NO! There are quite a lot of things that can be done with BOSS, like a visual search engine that displays cut out portions of the web pages above the text results or those of a social search that highlight results from profiles in the social network. How is this achieved? APIs as we mentioned above do the trick, your BOSS is kind enough to combine various open platforms with Yahoo’s search (example Twitter plus Yahoo search) so the result you get is the mix of both rather than individual searches performed separately. Expansion eh! Definitely is and that too without a multiple search attempts from the various search engines.

Why couldn’t Yahoo improve upon its own search instead of leaping forward with this idea? There had been an interesting remark by PowerSet product manager, Mark Johnson upon the building of a large scale business based upon search highlighting the impossibility saying:

Building a large-scale semantic search engine is expensive, requiring an engineering effort and computing resources beyond what most start-ups could ever imagine..

This was one of the reasons that lead PowerSet’s acquisition by Microsoft; expansion at the hands of another giant. But this strategy by Yahoo would definitely help as they put up an assumed user-base expansion by letting other search businesses make use of BOSS. It is obvious that any other search engine could never compete the giants namely Google, Yahoo and Microsoft; but with BOSS they tend to amalgamate themselves into one platform though staying independent. The chart below summarizes the assumption in a very logical way at what Yahoo plans at achieving with BOSS.

Investment? There is a bulk required to step up such an initiative to stand out in the competitive market and the estimates gross to around $300 million that cover everything from staff and hardware for indexing to the analysis and handling of queries.

According to Mark Hendrickson; BOSS has kicked off by opening up its web search to third parties with plans to move further by providing cloud-based search for all data that possibly exists.

So what’s with branding? Yahoo is quite watchful over the matter as senior director of Yahoo’s search platform, Bill Michaels adds:

You cannot put in any Yahoo attribution. This is not indicative of the Yahoo search product

Is this targeted at hitting on a particular audience for monetization that is to bee implemented over the next few months? The idea sounds good enough but the present focus would be at accumulating a user-base for the service; then on the results achieved implement a couple of tricks to filter out what is profitable and what simply isn’t. As Raghavan add:

You might have more focused audiences, which could potentially be enhanced by proprietary data. But on the other hand, it’s unclear when you fragment traffic what happens to the overall quality of traffic. You have factors that could weigh in either direction. It’s premature to make a clear conclusion on the revenue per search metric.

What ever the plans be, BOSS might very well act out leading the countless scattered services bringing them up as a united front against the giants in the league.