Yahoo will charge for Boss

AS EXPECTED, Yahoo has shifted its Boss search service to a paid model.

Yahoo launched Boss in July 2008 and it has been popular amongst developers trying to build their own search engine based on Yahoo's data.

But with its search engine powered by Microsoft Bing now, Yahoo has decided to switch BOSS to a pay per use model.

According to Yahoo, Bing will be providing some of the search results, but not all. However the price will be based on the number of queries and will range from $0.40 to $0.75 per 1,000 queries.

The price will depend on whether you are querying web data, images, news or other information.

Yahoo plans on offering Boss V1, the free version, for free for 60 days after it starts up Boss V2, the paid version. That should happen early next year.

Boss V2 will continue to be an API for web, image, and news search. Core web and image results eventually will be served by Microsoft's Bing.

The paid version will provide full flexibility to blend, stack, and re-rank results. This will give developers the ability to display exactly what users need. Developers will only be able to access it via the Yahoo developer network standard authentication.

Boss V2 will provide a self-service payment model. Developers will be able to add credit-card authentication at sign-up and check usage, billing, and other information on a completely redesigned dashboard interface. µ