Blog: Academics Sink Teeth Into Yahoo Search Service

Academics Sink Teeth Into Yahoo Search Service
CNet (10/10/08) Shankland, Stephen
Academics and startups can construct their own search sites around Yahoo's search engine at no charge and manipulate results as they see fit through Yahoo's Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS), and the venture could give Yahoo potentially higher standing in a market where Google reigns supreme. BOSS can be used to modify search results, as illustrated by an application used by Chengxiang Zhai and Bin Tan of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Their application directed Yahoo's search engine along specific paths based on the data stored on the user's own computer to deduce which of several items that shared the same name a user was more likely to be searching for. "We believe the client side of personalization ... can alleviate concern over privacy and it can provide more information about user activity," Zhai says. "And it can naturally distribute computation" so a search company's machines share work with the user's own system. Another service of potentially substantial value to academics is Yahoo's search assist feature, which suggests searches based on what people have started to type into the search box. For instance, it can display the variations of a search term, its membership in diverse categories, and the probability that people are searching for the term by itself or as part of a bigger query. "That's got a lot of potential," says Stanford University natural-language processing Ph.D. candidate Dan Ramage.

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