Yahoo! Doesn't Know What Will Happen with BOSS; YUI, YQL and Pipes Unaffected by Deal

One of the biggest questions regarding the new Microsoft-Yahoo! deal is what will happen to Yahoo!’s search offerings in its Developer Network. Yahoo! is known for being pretty open, which was a major reasons that many thought last year’s Microsoft acquisition offer was a bad idea. The cultures just didn’t seem to mesh.

Fast forward to yesterday and the deal was severely watered down from 2008 proposals. Yahoo! will maintain the UI in its search pages and the two companies will essentially engaging in a revenue-sharing agreement, powered by Bing.

But what will happen to Yahoo! offerings like BOSS, which allow developers to harness Yahoo! search technology for their sites and applications. The answer: even the BOSS team doesn’t know. Not yet.

Chris Yeh, head of the Yahoo! Developer Network (YDN), did take to the YDN blog to ensure that YUI, YQL, and Pipes will remain unaffected by the deal. But the deal is just too new to know how it will affect YDN’s search offerings.

Hopefully, Microsoft will adopt BOSS and SearchMonkey into Bing.

Around the beginning of the year, Microsoft snagged a bunch of former Yahoo! execs with experience in search. It won’t be surprising if their influence encourages Microsoft to incorporate more openness into search there.

Actually, Microsoft is much more of an open company than people think. For example, the Windows Mobile operating system was been open to developers for years before the iPhone came on the scene. They don’t approve or reject apps (like Apple does), and there are many sites on the web where you can get the apps. When you think about it, it’s a big strange that Live Search was so closed.

What do you think should happen to BOSS and SearchMonkey? Leave a comment and give your opinion.