Yahoo BOSS Geo Services
Yahoo BOSS is a suite of services that provides Developers premium API's that can support Search and Geo applications. BOSS Geo services include two primary offerings today, Placefinder and PlaceSpotter, which allows developers to geo-enrich their applications and make them more location aware. Learn more about the offerings below.
How Do I Get Started?
- Learn more about BOSS Geo.
- Understand the pricing.
- Review the documentation and attribution rules.
- Review the step-by-step tutorial to sign up for BOSS.
- Create an oAuth key.
- Click here for Support and Community.
- Click here for Yahoo BOSS Status Dashboard.
- Learn more about other BOSS Services.
- Using Y! Geo services in non-commercial settings.
Signing up for BOSS
BOSS is a suite of services including Search and Geo offerings. Developers need to only sign up for BOSS and can pick the specific service (PlaceFinder, web search, etc) at run time by identifying your call type.
Review the step by step tutorial and sign up when ready.
Pricing
| Query Type | Tier (Queries Per Day) | Price/1000 Queries (USD) |
|---|---|---|
| 0 - 10,000 | $6.00 | |
| PlaceFinder | 10,001 - 35,000 | $4.00 |
| 35,000+ | $3.00 | |
| PlaceSpotter | N/A | $8.00 |
This table only reflects an overview of the pricing. Please review the entire pricing and payments for all Yahoo BOSS services.
Overview of BOSS Geo
Yahoo BOSS PlaceFinder
Yahoo PlaceFinder is a geocoding Web service that helps developers make their applications location-aware by converting street addresses or place names into geographic coordinates (and vice versa).
PlaceFinder recognizes a large number of place formats and returns rich geographic data about each result, including geographic coordinates, address components, and Where On Earth IDentification number (WOEID). The WOEIDs returned by the service can be passed to Yahoo's GeoPlanet™* API for further geographic enrichment and discovery.
PlaceFinder allows you to convert street addresses like, "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC", or place names like, "Washington, DC", into geographic coordinates of degrees latitude 38.898717 and longitude -77.035974 that you can use as the center of a map or the position for a map marker. This conversion is called "geocoding" and can be used to make your applications location-aware. The service also allows you to convert geographic coordinates into street addresses or place names. This conversion is called "reverse geocoding" and can be used to provide user feedback when only coordinates are known.
Yahoo BOSS PlaceSpotter
PlaceSpotter helps developers make their applications location-aware by identifying places in unstructured and "atomic" content - feeds, web pages, news, status updates - and returning geographic metadata for geographic indexing and markup.
PlaceSpotter provides geo-enrichment for the hugely significant proportion of Web content that is geographically relevant but not geographically discoverable. Provided with free-form text, the service identifies places mentioned in text, disambiguates those places, and returns unique identifiers (WOEIDs) for each, as well as information about how many times the place was found in the text, and where in the text it was found. The WOEIDs returned by the service can be passed to Yahoo's GeoPlanet API for further geographic enrichment and discovery.
PlaceSpotter is not a geocoder. PlaceSpotter is a geo-data-extraction tool designed to help determine the 'whereness' of a document or atomic unit of text.
Additional Yahoo BOSS Geo Features
Here are some key additional features of the new BOSS Geo offerings:
- Unlimited Queries Per Day (See Pricing Chart)
- No Restrictions on Your Page Design and Presentation
- Focused Yahoo Brand Attribution
- User Authentication Security and HTTPS Support
- Self-Serve with Credit Card Authentication at Sign-up
- Simplified monthly billing (Placefinder only)
- Developer Access to Usage and Billing Information
- Access to both Search and Geo offerings with one sign up.
- Ample Documentation and Broad Technical Support
Support and Community
- General questions and comments.
- Frequently asked questions.
- Account specific questions - Use the account specific Support Form. Instructions on accessing form.
BOSS developers who sign up for new platform have access to a support form for specific questions relating to issues such as billing, services issues, etc.
Yahoo BOSS Status Dashboard
The uptime performance of all BOSS API's are shown on the new Y!DN API Status Dashboard Page (beta). The dashboard provides directional uptime information broken down by region.
If you have any questions, please raise them on the BOSS YahooGroup.
Additional Information
Terms of Use
Use of this service is subject to the BOSS Terms of Use.
Non-Commercial usage of Yahoo Geo API's
Yahoo continues to fully support developer applications built on top of Placefinder and PlaceSpotter in non-commercial settings. Both services are available to you via YQL and rate limited to 2000 queries per table. Learn more about using the Placefinder and Placespotter YQL tables.
Learn more about other BOSS Services
BOSS is a suite of developer facing premium offerings. BOSS Geo is part of the larger set of API and hosted offerings. Here are the full set of offerings:
- BOSS API offers various search backends such as web and image search. No additional sign up is required. Simply review the documentation and start using the service.
- BOSS Hosted Search offers developers a fully hosted web search offering for free. It provides flexibility to control the branding, background and foreground colors. In addition, qualified developers will be paid a monthly revenue share.
Ready to get started?
By applying for an Application ID for this service, you hereby agree to the Terms of Use