BOSS Goes to College

Yahoo! Academic Relations group joined forces with the Yahoo! BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) team to kick off BOSS-U, the academic track of the BOSS initiative. BOSS is Yahoo!'s open search Web services platform designed to foster innovation in the search industry by providing access to Yahoo!'s investments in crawling and indexing, ranking and relevancy algorithms, and powerful infrastructure. Developers and company partners are already using BOSS to build and launch Web-scale search products that utilize the entire Yahoo! search index.

Through BOSS-U, Yahoo! is engaging the talents of world-class faculty members and graduate students in relevant technical areas such as Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and Data Mining. By providing these creative and innovative researchers with unprecedented resources, BOSS-U has the potential to revolutionize Web search.

On September 25, a group of hand-picked academic participants convened in Yahoo!’s Sunnyvale headquarters for the inaugural BOSS-U workshop. Led by Head of Yahoo! Research Prabhakar Raghavan, the workshop was jointly funded and organized by Academic Relations and the BOSS Team. The workshop consisted of a series of all-day sessions in which academics from MIT, Stanford, UIUC, UMass, and Purdue, and experts from the Yahoo! Search Team and Yahoo! Research brainstormed and discussed ways to incorporate BOSS-U into academic research and teaching programs. The university researchers were unanimous in their praise of Yahoo!’s forward thinking and of the potential game-changing nature of the BOSS initiative.

The BOSS team and Yahoo! Academic Relations will increase the number of academic collaborators in BOSS-U in the future and, if the initial workshop is any indication, this important initiative will benefit greatly from the creativity and innovation of Yahoo!’s partners in academia.