Yahoo! BOSS is easy — meet Yuil

Posted on July 30, 2008 by Sam Pullara

Updated Yet Again: Relaunched as 4hoursearch including the source code. See this blog entry.

Updated Again: Yuil is dead. However, you can always get the same great search results here.

Updated: Using Glue I was able to add some simple category functionality.

I’m sure everyone saw the recent announcement of a new search engine, Cuil. I thought I would have a little fun with it and put together a quick parody of it by mashing up their UI and Yahoo!’s search results. As usual, the biggest problems I had were related to my pathetic Python skills. I’d love to add the category stuff in (Yahoo! has that info as you can see in search assist) but BOSS doesn’t yet have that in the API.  But it does have web and image search and even search suggestions. Here is the one, the only, the amazing:

It was great fun to hack together. Check out the BOSS APIs. Maybe I should have converted the UI to YUI as well…

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  • hhhhh
    stop being a CLONE
  • Fair is fair and Cuil is fairly cool and the media hoopla on the Cuil launch is well deserved and totally understandable (even if a bit harsh). After all, Cuil was built by a team of top-notch ex-Google engineers. But did you know that another new search engine -- built by a team of top-notch ex-Google users -- has surpassed Cuil in traffic this month? And with nary a lick of media love. Check out NeXplore Search (www.NeXplore.com) vs. Cuil (www.cuil.com) for the month of September using whatever website traffic comparison tool you prefer -- Google Trends, Alexa, Compete, etc. Cuil’s focus -- more algorithmic complexity. NeXplore’s focus -- a more visually engaging and productive search results page. Seems pretty clear which approach real folk prefer...
  • Nice! Good work
  • Yahoo didn't take this down the "author" did. An example of a good idea "implemented" by a blogger looking for page ranks. A perfect example of all that's wrong w/people who don't get the internet or want to be part of anything real of any change. Another sap trying to use online culture purely in an attempt to make themselves feel relevant. I'd write more if anything that mattered was related to this site. Over all impact, I can finally nuke tech crunches rss feed. Linking here was the last laugh they have at my expense.
  • NO on chinese...
  • Cuil idea :)
    you could keep it up and about somewhere.
  • JP Kellog
    I'm no techhie but I use search engines a lot. And I think the biggest shortcoming in all of the top three is that
    they do not return the most recent/thus relevant content first. For example, if I search google or yahoo for "used j/80" I'll get several useful links but I rarely get up to date links. The above search returned two "way" dated links in the top five results--sorry but that is lame. I realize I could used advanced options,etc--but I still have this problem. It would be nice if someone were able to figure out a way to return the most recent (by date) first. JMHO. Thanks.
  • netstarman
    Does yahoo have the right to be picking a fight with a new search engine at this point when other search engines like google , live search is way better than yahoo search. That's a bad jab at a start up search engine that just might with a few clean ups and bug fixing some people will change there mind , i love a good parady but Yahoo just doesn't need to be jabbing at other people new company. Yahoo stock wouldn't be up if it wasn't being sought after before by Microsoft. I like a good start of a new search company.
  • Once again, Yahoo!, by taking this down, proven that they are run by morons.
  • NoBS
    How lame is that... there you have the greatest publicity all over the web and all over the blogs... and the best possible PR and media advertising for Yahoo and it's api - and trust me yahoo could needs some positive PR these days with the crap you buddy Jerry has been pulling - and right after all the major news outlets wrote about it you take it down.

    I wonder why, did marketing give you a call? if so someone should fire those Yahoo marketing dudes... and even if they didnt give you a call, for not giving you a call to leave it up.

    Publicity and advertising like this would cost you guys millions... and what do you guys do... shut it down...
    I hate to say this but you guys deserve where you guys are in the search war. There you do something right, something brilliant and you shut it down right before you can cash in on millions and millions of free editorial advertising and fun positive PR..

    Sorry I am just rather speechless by this ignorance...
  • Shii
    Why did you take it down? Did it "dilute the brand"? No wonder nobody uses Yahoo, they're a corporate bureaucracy.
  • This was too fun and harmless to be pulled down. Maybe cuil was jealous that it actually workes better than theirs without millions invested.
  • Would really like to see something new developed from Sam, great knowledge it seems!


    http://blabtech.blogspot.com
  • Yeah as usual I'm late, I did however get to test Cuil yesterday and wasn't impressed at all. Serveral of my search returned no results. And with my crappy gppgle PR i still returned in the top ten on google for certain searches, but on cuil no results at all. Hopefully I'll be crawled by Cuil soon, or does it really matter? lol
    Guess I'll check out yahoo search a bit, been stuck in the Google trap for the last few years.
    http://bsods.com
  • The whole Yuil/Cuil thing is funny. The Cuil story is the number one story on thriveorfail right now, and there's another interesting one on Yuil here: http://www.thriveorfail.com/stories/story_detai...
  • Nice one. Very clever. I guess you could do a url specific BOSS image search per result link in order to get images as well. However, this could take time so you’d need to do it in async mode. On server side I am not sure how you’d do it in Python on AppEngine and on the client side you’d run into concurrent requests from the same domain problem. It would be cool though if it was a 1-1 copy of the interface.

    It would be hard to make it a complete 1-for-1 copy because I have no idea where they come up with their images. What I would like is to grab an image from the page that I’m linking to. It would be better if I was doing my own crawl for that…
    I have hear that the categories will be coming in the next versions of BOSS. Sam to my knowledge BOSS does not support search suggestions.

    I’m using the regular Yahoo! Search Suggest API.

    BTW you should use the ClickURL (as per TOS) for the links in the results when using BOSS.

    Strangely, they are the same for the searches that I am doing. I expected the redirects. This might have something to do with the changes that were recently rolled out on Yahoo! SERPs that don’t requite it.
    Thanks,
    Sam


    It is a pity you had to pull it - no sense of humor I guess.

    BTW we at Cluuz do the image and tag extraction on the fly after we get the response from BOSS. Check it out at http:www.cluuz.com .
  • Lol, very nice stuff. I was wondering what this thing was about.
  • As an artist (see my site), I'd be happy to have my works illustrate whatever, but I'd also like to have a link to my site... whenever I pick up images I always credit them (in blogs).

    As for yet another search engine, I think we need one that finds what we were really looking for...

    Matthew Rose / Paris, France
  • Ohh, I missed it. Saw only the screenshot at Blogoscoped.
  • Pranav
    This was featured in Google News. Sadly, by the time I got here, Yuil was dead.
    I had to get a sense from the comments on this site.
  • SachinIsABlogSpammer
    Sachin, we don't appreciate blogspam. Please be a little more considerate next time. If you actually made Suil, please make it more obvious on your site. Thanks.
  • Guil would be interesting... I mean with the whole layout of Cuil and the power of Google... It would probably be a success... if only companies would let things like this fly... unfortunately not.

    http://blabtech.blogspot.com
  • It's rather hypocritical of Cuil to issue a cease and desist when they have a policy of copyright and trademark violation. They have taken images from my site (amoungst others) and used them to illustrate other listings. Naturally I, like so many others, have had no reply to my emails.

    Fair use for a search engine would be to illustrate an entry for a site with samples from that site, unfair use is to plunder the site for content to use to give their site a 'magazine' look.

    I have already had complaints that my trademark logo appears next to entries for other sites, from people clicking expecting to come to my site and one site concerned who have been asked whether I have taken them over.
  • Narayan
    Great job, Sam. It's sad that by the time this part of the world woke up, Yuil had already been killed after having won many hearts.
  • Brilliant parody/hack. I tested it before the lawyers ruined the fun. You did a great job and it really shows that we are entering a new world of search as infrastructure for apps. BOSS is the future of search IMHO and you showed that brilliantly. yahoo/yeeha!
  • Mason
    Those damn laywers always stop the fun.....
  • Is Yuil C&D already? .. Come on let us in on why Yuil is dead... appreciate it!
  • Tim
    they got a cease and desist from cuil.
  • George P.
    Epic on so many levels. Brilliant.
  • Ohhhhh... Yuil is dead. :(

    I am starting to see the reason behind why this was killed.
  • Why did you kill YUIL! It might have been bigger than cuil..well atleast for a few years before cuil got better(a good part of me says cuil is going to get better and better). You have been featured on techcrunch too!!
  • put it back! :)
  • JT
    I'm in w/ Vallymonger, please turn Yuil back on. I was totally underwhelmed by Cuil and to see that you were able to knock something together in one day using Yahoo! BOSS, that's awsome. That the results were better - that rocks! Leave it up if only to teach the egos at Cuil a lesson.
  • valleymonger
    please put it back up. who cares if the cuil people get sentimental or don't have a sense of humor?

    it's super important to show that PR-hyped sites like cuil need to get a much better in order to actually be able to compete with yahoo and the like!
  • Stefan
    So awesome. Sam, can I get a Yuil t-shirt.
  • Shivram Mani
    lol ... u've made news in techcrunch too ..
  • Beautiful... Well done Sam. We have been using the BOSS api as well at Triggit and having a lot of luck
  • Pretty cool! The exception is raised when a single quote is in the search, FYI.
  • Abe
    Some searches dump the call stack from an exception being thrown.
    It only happens then I search for garbage like 'a;lj;lkj230923oijf'.

    Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "/base/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/ext/webapp/__init__.py", line 499, in __call__
    handler.get(*groups)
    File "/base/data/home/apps/sampullara/1.169/yuil/yuil.py", line 26, in get
    results = ysr['resultset_web']
    KeyError: 'resultset_web'

    But besides that, this is very cool!
  • Yep, as noted, the results are much better than Cuil. Very cool!
  • Frazer
    Just brilliant - with the five queries I tried, Yuil beat Cuil on every one.

    Try them: "Bill Clinton" "Sergey Brin" "Eric Schmidt" "9/11" "Carrots"


    Frankly speaking I'm really disappointed with Cuil. Not so disappointed with the search results being so lousy - after all, there are at least three other 'good enough' search engines. No - I'm disappointed because they did a fantastic job of hyping their launch, and then they flatly failed to deliver. This will have the effect of de-sensitizing people to the launch of new search engines. It will put people off trying them, and make it even harder to compete with the mighty three.
  • A brilliant idea and in contrast to guil.com yuil provides useful search results. Great work!
  • sam

    Nice one. Very clever. I guess you could do a url specific BOSS image search per result link in order to get images as well. However, this could take time so you’d need to do it in async mode. On server side I am not sure how you’d do it in Python on AppEngine and on the client side you’d run into concurrent requests from the same domain problem. It would be cool though if it was a 1-1 copy of the interface.



    It would be hard to make it a complete 1-for-1 copy because I have no idea where they come up with their images. What I would like is to grab an image from the page that I'm linking to. It would be better if I was doing my own crawl for that...

    I have hear that the categories will be coming in the next versions of BOSS. Sam to my knowledge BOSS does not support search suggestions.


    I'm using the regular Yahoo! Search Suggest API.


    BTW you should use the ClickURL (as per TOS) for the links in the results when using BOSS.




    Strangely, they are the same for the searches that I am doing. I expected the redirects. This might have something to do with the changes that were recently rolled out on Yahoo! SERPs that don't requite it.

    Thanks,
    Sam
  • Nice one. Very clever. I guess you could do a url specific BOSS image search per result link in order to get images as well. However, this could take time so you'd need to do it in async mode. On server side I am not sure how you'd do it in Python on AppEngine and on the client side you'd run into concurrent requests from the same domain problem. It would be cool though if it was a 1-1 copy of the interface. I have hear that the categories will be coming in the next versions of BOSS.

    Sam to my knowledge BOSS does not support search suggestions. BTW you should use the ClickURL (as per TOS) for the links in the results when using BOSS.
  • grah!
    lol. nice work :)
  • The funny thing is that the results from YUIL (well, Yahoo Search, of course) seem way more relevant and interesting to me that those returned by Cuil.
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