on Aug 5th, 2008Yahoo BOSS - simple, open and awesome
Reached home early yesterday and read an article about Yahoo BOSS and its open nature. In my effort to kill time, till dinner, I sat and read through the documentation for BOSS and it turns out its the easiest open search ever. I used the Google Coop as my site search but, somehow the techie inside me couldn’t rest at the thought of someone else doing the tech for me. BOSS looked really tempting with its good results and recent indexes; I sat down to build my site search.
BOSS is simple. Really really simple and can do wonders if you are planning to build a search engine with your own flavor. Unlike other searches, BOSS gives you XML/JSON, meaning you can re-order results and present them in any way you like. Add flash, css, javascript, canvas elements whatever to build that unique search experience. After the cuil ripoff Yuil, which got taken down and was relaunched again as 4Hoursearch (why did they call it that ? figure it out Einstein !!), I was sure BOSS would be easy, but didn’t know it would be this easy.
Its only recently that I started learning Python, and I suck at it, so I picked my old favorite PHP as the language of choice ( I suck at PHP too, but suck less compared to Python). Got myself an Application ID to use BOSS. Used PHP SimpleXML parser to get a URL of choice and Voila, I had my results in an array. Wrote some really rudimentary CSS to match the aesthetics of my site and my site search was done .
Check out my Yahoo BOSS powered site search here !!
If it wasn’t for my crappy PHP skill level, Im sure I could have wrapped up the entire thing, right from “Duh, what is BOSS ?” to the implementation, in under an hour. If I do find more time to kill whilst I wait for dinner, I shall experiment with different displays for search results from BOSS. Y! BOSS is truly open and in keeping with the Open Source spirit, I have shared my rudimentary site search code. You wont believe it but the code , with proper convention, HTML and CSS comes up to 65 lines . Isn’t it awesome ??
Get the code for site search here.
Another wonderful manifestation of this concept is that you can now build custom search engines that will search only the sites that you catalog for information you need. Check out Y! BOSS.
Tags: yahoo, BOSS, sitesearch, search
very nice search implementation
btw, no need to even say powered by yahoo boss - you’re in full control of attribution
also if you could post your boss-src package to the ysearchboss group that would be awesome. i think lots of people can benefit from your php solution
I’m trying a search now on http://riteshnayak.com/boss.php and am not getting any results.
Seems to be working fine Phil. Its a site search utility, so it only searches for information on my site . For a general search utility, please wait until my next blog post.
I seem to be missing something. I tried searching “PHP”, “python” and “boss” and got no results.
Hey Phil,
There are two possible explanations:
1. if you are trying my site search, then http://riteshnayak.com/boss.php is working fine. PHP and boss are returning about 4 results each. Python doesnt return anything coz I haven’t written anything abotu python. You can also try http://riteshnayak.com/morey_intro.html , its a generic yahoo search split into three columns.
2. If you are trying to run my code, then please re-download the source from my site. There was a small bug in the code, which I have fixed. If you want to fix the code yourself, then find the form tag and remove the action=”boss.php” and make it action=”" That should do the trick. Let me know if you have problems, also make sure you have your appid and your personal site address mentioned at the top of the code.
Ritesh
Hi there,
greate sample… !!!
For me it’s work great
can you make an example with a pictures also please ?
Thanks in advance