New Yahoo BOSS Applications: Smells Like Cuil Spirit
Yahoo recently launched BOSS, aka Build your Own Search Service. Third party developers wasted no time making use of the API to build their version of what search should look like. Yahoo featured four BOSS applications on their Yahoo Search blog.
The first one was 4 Hour Search. Named for how long it took developer Sam Pullara to build the BOSS API/YUI design mashup. It looks a lot like newly launched search engine Cuil.
And just like Cuil, 4 Hour Search is experiencing errors this morning. The above screenshot is Yahoo-supplied. And that’s not the only BOSS app that was struggling.
Newsline didn’t work for me at first. I conducted a search comparing the coverage of the situations in South Ossetia, Georgia and the coup in Mauritania. At first, I got error pages. Then, I was able to get results, but not that many from today or the past week. And that’s after I found the current news. The page brings up a dynamic timeline (which is cool), but it loaded news from 2 years ago front and center.
3D visualization search app Tianamo crashed my Firefox browser, then loaded just a dark blue screen in IE. But here’s the screenshot Yahoo posted:
There was one app that did just fine – PlayerSearch. This BOSS app is great for sports fans – especially Fantasy Sports fanatics. This site worked just fine. Have at it, sports junkies.
It’s likely that the developers weren’t prepared for so much traffic to come their way, but Yahoo should have known better before it told the world about the new apps.