Yahoo boasts of Boss API success

Yahoo's Boss API now serves more than 10 million searches per day

Yahoo is touting the early success of its Build Your Own Search Service (Boss), citing numbers from research firm ComScore to claim that the Boss application programming interface (API) had become the fifth most popular search engine on the web.

Launched in July, the Boss system allows users to run the Yahoo engine as an internal search system for their own sites.

Yahoo said that Boss now serves more than 10 million searches per day, placing it just behind Ask.com in the overall search engine rankings.

The ranking does not factor in searches from Yahoo's primary search engine, only those performed on third-party sites running the API.

Boss development team member Bill Michels said in a company blog posting that the figure is encouraging to the developers behind the programme.

"10 million in itself isn't particularly significant, but we're sharing it because we believe that growing to more than 100 queries a second in just over five months says something about the demand for an open search platform," he wrote.

The success of Boss is a welcome bit of good news for Yahoo. The company has struggled in recent months with a round of layoffs, the departure of chief executive Jerry Yang and a fresh bout of takeover rumours.