Yahoo! is going with the “if you can beat ‘em, open it up and give it away” strategy.  So far that midset hasn’t proven too successful for Reddit, who opened their platform last month with poor results.  We’ll see how this works out for Yahoo!.  Trying to win by championing the longtail portion of the market is tricky and typically does not work out too well.  Yesterday, Yahoo! introduced their new open Web services platform, Yahoo! Search BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service), which gives third parties access to Yahoo!’s inferior search technology.  They are opening up and including the ability to re-rank and control the presentation of Web search results. Yahoo! Search BOSS, available today as an API in beta, enables developers and companies to build search experiences with much more flexibility that Yahoo! has ever allowed before.

BOSS extends Yahoo!’s new “Open Strategy” by giving access to the Yahoo! Search infrastructure and technology. This builds on another recent launch of Yahoo!’s SearchMonkey developer platform, which opened up the Yahoo! search results page to allow site owners and developers to create enhanced search results.

“Today, the search market is generally limited to three major search engines to drive innovation and growth,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, chief strategist for Yahoo! Search. “BOSS opens up the playing field for developers and companies to disrupt the search market, become principals in search and build new Web search experiences that offer more choice for users.”

So what is it all about?

BOSS provides developers and companies access to its algorithmic search infrastructure without incurring the significant costs required to build Web-scale search experiences. By using the BOSS platform, partners have the opportunity to provide industry leading search results. BOSS allows for control over the presentation and ranking of Web search results as well as unlimited queries per day. Its framework allows developers to blend Yahoo! Search results from Web, news and image indexes with any data source from across the Web. Over time, other Yahoo! Search indexes will become available.

Over the next several months, a BOSS monetization capability, using Yahoo! search advertising and potentially other models, will be made available for partners and developers to create a search revenue stream for their business.  They are not saying if these monetization units will include the Google ads that are much higher paying then Yahoo!’s in house eCPMs.

BOSS Web Services Platforms: API and Custom

BOSS will offer two options for companies and developers. Developers can now begin using the BOSS API and the mash-up framework tools and see examples of how they could deploy BOSS on their sites by visiting the Yahoo! Developer Network site, here. The self-service API allows developers to quickly get started in creating new Web search experiences.

The BOSS Custom service will be offered to select partners with large-scale needs in building and supporting Web search experiences.

BOSS University

Yahoo! has also partnered with top technology universities to drive search experimentation, innovation and research for search. Eminent researchers will now be able to conduct open research on search engines that was impossible in the academic environment. Yahoo! is currently working with the Carnegie Mellon University, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Purdue University, Stanford University, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMASS).