Searching..for the one right answer
Yesterday Yahoo! announced their BOSS platform. BOSS is an API into their search infrastructure that lets application builders build a new unique search experience on top of all the Yahoo indexed content. It makes a lot of sense, as search is not an easy thing to do, especially when your corpus of content is the entire world. For fun I lined up Google, Yahoo, Me.dium, and Hakia.. The latter two are utilizing the BOSS platform. Finally, I threw in my Lijit search operated off Lijit’s own crawling and indexing infrastructure.
It’s actually pretty interesting how similar Google and Yahoo results are for this vast sample set of 1 search for “paris catacombs”.
Obviously Lijit returns much different results because Lijit isn’t constrained by the “one right answer” problem. The Lijit results are centric to me (the publisher) and my experiences, as if you had asked me about the Paris Catacombs. The right answer is what “I know” about the paris catacombs, the corpus is my experiences – my writings, my bookmarks, my photos, my videos and stuff my friends know. Of course, Lijit is not a destination search site so we live in a different space then the others. They have the problem of delivering one right answer, we have the difficulty of returning thousands.
The takeaway for me is Yahoo! BOSS and Google CSE are both great platforms to build innovative search applications on top of. However, at the end of the day, innovation on top will rule that day or other everyone will just return the same results formatted differently. Look forward to seeing more in this space from everyone.