Group items tagged

BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is Yahoo!'s open search web services platform. The goal of BOSS is simple: to foster innovation in the search industry. Developers, start-ups, and large Internet companies can use BOSS to build and launch web-scale search products that utilize the entire Yahoo! Search index. BOSS gives you access to Yahoo!'s investments in crawling and indexing, ranking and relevancy algorithms, and powerful infrastructure. By combining your unique assets and ideas with our search technology assets, BOSS is a platform for the next generation of search innovation, serving hundreds of millions of users across the Web.

The Yahoo! BOSS API allows you to access the Yahoo! search index with new levels of freedom. You can rearrange the results, change their look, have unlimited requests, mash the results with other resources, and you don't even have to let people know that Yahoo! is powering the page. Many people are busy mashing the BOSS results with internal data sets, proprietary logic, and new visual interfaces.

Today I finally plugged-in the Yahoo Boss Mashup Framework into the Google App Engine environment. Google App Engine (GAE) provides a pretty sweet yet simple platform for executing Python applications on Google's infrastructure. The Boss Mashup Framework (BMF) provides Python API's for accessing Yahoo's Search API's as well remixing data a la SQL constructs. Running BMF on top of GAE is a seemingly natural progression, and quite arguably the easiest way to deploy Boss - so I spent today porting BMF to the GAE platform. See also http://bossy.appspot.com/qa?query=who+is+brad+pitt+married+to

Making sense of the world is a ubiquitous activity, taking place around the margins of what we know. At work, your boss says, "Can you give a presentation next week on how wireless will affect our business?" Or perhaps, you join a new committee, and wonder "Who are these people? Who is in charge? What is our mission? What are we really going to do?" Maybe you move to a new neighborhood, and you try to make sense of the streets, schools, parks, shopping, and neighbors. Or you say to yourself, "I really need to get an updated cellphone-what has been happening with the current set of features, costs, plans and new gadgets?" Sensemaking can be a core professional task in itself, as for researchers, designers, or intelligence analysts. It arises when we change our place in the world or when the world changes around us. It arises when new problems, opportunities, or tasks present themselves, or when old ones resurface. It involves finding the important structure in a seemingly unstructured situation. It is an activity with cognitive and social dimensions, and has informational, communicational, and computational aspects.