In an indepth preview and announcement by Yahoo, we see a big move in the tiered pay/free API ecosystem. No doubt fueled by the current economic climate and the fight for Yahoo to make a comeback, Yahoo’s BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) will go paid in Q2 of this year.

Not all is lost, there are open pricing schemes and from what I can see up to 10k requests a day will still be free, so – you can still get your Kiva.org search engine going for free, but if it actually works out, you’re going to need to pay for it.

There is even more good news,
I swear I heard about this earlier this week (very shortly after the Kiva announcement) but I can’t find the post, but anyway… Yahoo will offer SearchMonkey integration into BOSS! This is very cool, and my mind has been flying through ideas since this annoucement. SearchMonkey is basically a service for “enhancing” yahoo search results with additional metadata. Ex. a search for a movie showing showtimes and rottentomatoe links right in the search!

Now that you’ve herd all about news with these API Services from Yahoo lets throw down some factsheets, explanations, api classes, and tutorials to help out some of the non-know’rs after the turn.

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