YAHOO BELIEVES the way to inject power into professors and grad students is by being the BOSS - or as it is more affectionately known, Build Your Own Search Service.

This service enables academics and start-ups to build their very own search sites around the Yahoo search engine.

Once this is set up - for free - the creators can manipulate the search results however they like.

Back in September, 24 students and researchers met up from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Purdue and Stanford to hear the BOSS pitch - overall their response was pretty positive.

MIT researcher, Harr Chen said, "It enables a lot of research that we wouldn't otherwise be able to do."

Yahoo's big plan is to make money from this service, as it believes as corporate users get large scale, BOSS will have to show Yahoo's search ads - the company hopes this will gain it some distinction with potentially influential thinkers in a market Google certainly dominates.

Yahoo reckons this isn't a brave or stupid move, as it doesn't believe it has anything to lose, "We're not a market leader... from a strategic standpoint, it does make sense to let other people innovate on top of us. If the pie grows, our share of the pie grows at the expense of somebody else," said Prabhakar Raghavan of the company.

Small scale operators may use BOSS for free - however, Yahoo needs larger efforts if its ultimate goals are to be reached. µ

L'Inq
Cnet