KallOut Wins BOSS Mashable Challenge, Socialmention Wins Runner Up

Congrats to KallOut and Socialmention!  KallOut is a pretty cool plug-in that is well worth checking out.

http://mashable.com/2008/10/14/boss-mashable-challenge-winners/

Thanks to Adam Hirsch, Mashable and the Yahoo BOSS Team.  It was great being part of this contest and I look forward to expanding our use of Yahoo BOSS API’s.

My previous coverage is here.

Voting Begins for BOSS Mashable Challenge

The field has been narrowed down and Player Search has been selected as one of the top 10 finalists for the Yahoo BOSS Mashable Challenge!  You can vote for Player Search here: http://mashable.com/2008/10/07/voting-boss-mashable-challenge/

Overview of the contest:

The BOSS Mashable Challenge pits developer against developer.  How do you win?  Build a kickass mashup – search engine or any other Web app – using the BOSS API and any other data sources/technologies. Yahoo! Search BOSS is a completely open API from Yahoo! Search.  It gives developers access to highly scalable Web, news and image search technology without the need to make large infrastructure investments.  More details of the contest can be found here.

Our submission:

“Player Search is a vertical search engine for sports that searches local and national news, video, photos, stats and more for content targeted to individual professional, collegiate and Olympic athletes.  Player Search leverages Yahoo BOSS APIs for its site search and news search categories as well as photos from Flickr.  Player Search searches the full spectrum of on-line sports content from mainstream sources such as Yahoo and CBS Sports to local newspapers, team websites, and sports blogs as well as the latest video highlights from ESPN, NFL Network, MLB.com and many others.”

Voting (in case you missed the link above!):

You can vote for Player Search here: http://mashable.com/2008/10/07/voting-boss-mashable-challenge/

Thank you to Matt Schauf at FantasySportsBusiness.com and Derrick Eckardt at RotoNation for their posts and support.  Much appreciated!

Thank you for your support!

Ted

PlayerSearch Highlighted in Yahoo BOSS Mashable Challenge

PlayerSearch is highlighted in the Yahoo BOSS Mashable Challenge.

http://mashable.com/2008/10/02/final-showcase-boss-mashable-challenge/

Player Search on TechCrunch

Mark Hendrickson mentions PlayerSearch in his article titled Yahoo BOSS used to create Powerset for images and more.

PlayerSearch Spotlight on Yahoo BOSS

PlayerSearch is spotlighted in a recent Yahoo Search Blog post on “What’s Being Built with BOSS”.

After Yahoo released their latest open search initiatives under Yahoo BOSS, we quickly (and easily) changed the web search component of Player Search to leverage their open search APIs. They have a great tool set that was very easy to build on. Users will never know where we get our web search results as they are seemlessly integrated into our site…which is great for our branding and improves the user experience by minimizing clutter. We can also sell our own ads alongside the results which is critical for our business model.

I am a huge fan of the open search APIs that Yahoo and Microsft provide. I am hoping these innovations enable them to compete better with Google…if that happens, they will be highly incented to continue innovating and supporting other search start-ups such as PlayerSearch.

How we use Yahoo BOSS:

Yahoo BOSS powers our “Web Links” search results. For most player searches, these links end up being for the player’s page on WikiPedia and some other major sports sites such as NFL.com or ESPN as well as the player’s personal website if they have one. The links are great and definitely helpful, particularly for searches that we don’t know (“open search”). Searches for players that we do know (such as Brett Favre), we can add a lot more to the search results such as breaking player news from local and national sources, stats, performance charts, game highlights from NFL Network, clips from ESPN’s SportsCenter, press conferences, fan generated videos on YouTube, photos, fantasy stats and much more. We have existing sports focused products (www.draftanalyzer.com), so we are familiar with the sports market and will continue to build on top of Yahoo BOSS and other APIs to improve our sports focused search.

Additional Coverage:

TechCrunch writes “Yahoo’s Search Blog has posted a list of some of the most promising new web apps being built using its BOSS search platform.”

CNET writes “some of the more interesting mashups are aiming to aid niche Web users. For sports lovers, the PlayerSearch sports search engine pulls in content from a host of sources”

SearchEngineWatch.com “There was one app that did just fine – PlayerSearch. This BOSS app is great for sports fans – especially Fantasy Sports fanatics. This site worked just fine. Have at it, sports junkies.”

KillerStartups.com writes “Imagine a place where you could go to get the latest sporting news from the best resources on the web. You can stop imagining it, because Playersearch.com is here.”