Are you around London this evening? Fancy learning how to leverage Yahoo’s new BOSS search API?

BOSS - Build (your) Own Search Service is Yahoo’s new API which allows you to build a search engine based on our systems. It is one of the first steps to make Yahoo! much more open for you to enhance and customize our offers for yourself.

During the BOSS hack event you will be able to meet the team, learn all about the API and have a first go at building your own search engine in a matter of minutes.

Check out the Upcoming event page for more information, and to sign up.

Yahoo! BOSS Hack Evening in London at Wallacespace (Monday November 10, 2008) - Upcoming

Inquisitor is a fantastic search add-on for Safari, and it’s recently been updated to version 3. Basically, it enhances the Safari search box by suggesting results and allowing searches on sites other than Google. Pretty essential, I would say.

Inquisitor

Yahoo search has now integrated McAfee’s SiteAdvisor into it’s search engine which means dodgy sites serving up spam and malware are flagged up:

SearchScan - Search with confidence at Yahoo!

As part of Yahoo’s plan to open up their search technology to external developers, a new tool called SearchMonkey is now being previewed. SearchMonkey allows you to add data services that can be used to present richer, more useful search results. Sign up for more information:

Yahoo! SearchMonkey: Oooh ooh oooh

Bundled with Mac OS 8.5 - 10.4, the Sherlock search tool became less and less useful as time went by. Apple claimed that Sherlock was “dramatically better than standard web browsers at retrieving and displaying some of the most practical and useful information available on the internet” without ever explaining why. The US-centric content was pretty much useless, and so it always remained a curiosity. That it even made it to OS X was a surprise, it was finally made obsolete by Spotlight and Dashboard and removed completely from 10.5 Leopard. Good riddance!

Aww, how cute… Yahoo homepage back in 1995:

Yahoo!

If you are interested in monitoring your online presence, or simply for a laugh, you can be alerted whenever your name is mentioned on a website. Here’s how:

1. visit Google Alerts
2. enter your name within double quotes in the Search terms box. e.g. “glen scott”
3. enter your e-mail address in the Your email box

Now, whenever your name is mentioned in a newly indexed page, you will be e-mailed with the link… fun!

This open search platform enables 3rd parties to build and present the next generation of search results. There are a number of layers and capabilities that we have built into the platform, but our intent is clear — present users with richer, more useful search results so that they can complete their tasks more efficiently and get from “to do” to “done.”

Yahoo! Search Blog: An Open Approach to Search

This is a follow-up to my earlier post, Search engine snippets. My site has now got a meta description tag and Google and Yahoo have both picked up on it:

Google:

Yahoo:

Google shows just the content of the meta description tag, whilst Yahoo also adds some content from the top of my blog.

An interesting comparison of what content the two main search engines have chosen to display for my blog:

Google:

Yahoo!:

Google seems to have just picked up the footer of my site , whereas Yahoo has picked up the header, some post content and the footer.

At the moment, there is no meta description on the page which I’ll add soon to see how the listings change.