Briefs

Posted by Stephen Shankland, CNET

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--It only took a few years for the science of information retrieval to move from an obscure academic niche to the secretive research departments at the heart of multibillion-dollar Internet companies.

But one of those companies, Yahoo, is trying to give a little more power back to the professors and grad students through a program called BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service). The service lets academics and start-ups build their own search sites around Yahoo's search engine for free, manipulating results however they want.

Two dozen researchers and students from Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Purdue, and other universities met here at Yahoo for a day in September to hear the company's BOSS pitch, show off some ideas they've had for how to use it, and try to coax Yahoo into sharing even more information through BOSS. Overall, their response to Yahoo's program was favorable.

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