Yahoo’s Product director for BOSS, Yahoo’s search on the cloud system, presents how BOSS can be used to customise searches and presentation of results without the user having to own its search infrastructure. As most cloud computing systems that are emerging whether they are related to storing documents on the cloud, or running a search engine in the cloud, it is more economics and service guarantees that matter more than technology itself. Yahoo will start charging for BOSS usage when user queries exceed a specific limit, so it all comes down to whether it is economically viable to using BOSS when the client service itself may not be monetizing its search based front end application.
Yahoo ! Search Platform from Headstart Network Foundation on Vimeo.
Technically, the fact that BOSS only spews search results and not the link graph itself limits its use to more sophisticated use of search in the cloud.