It looks to me like "open search results" platform. While cool, I think deeper access would be far more beneficial to both third parties and Y!. But it's certainly a step in the right direction.

Yeah. The real name should be something like Yahoo Opt-In Search Result Decorator Platform.

It's harder to loop third parties into actual search processing and ranking -- for one thing, they would have an incentive to rank their own results the highest. Yahoo has an incentive to keep results globally relevant.

Alexa Web Search is a little deeper, but it also doesn't give you an API to the inverted index itself.

From the article: a set of APIs that allow third parties to modify search results on Yahoo by adding images, structured data and additional deep links.

This will require some really strong safeguards against spammers and pranksters. For example, if Yahoo only require an image reference then won't take long before users get goatse.

Mostly, you have to opt in. There are a few ones turned on by default.

Someone would have to provide a genuinely useful service and then turn prankster. Could happen, but unlikely.

A friend works at an unnamed newswire and he's shocked by the lack of safeguards.

It would be possible for Yahoo to trust a reputable newpaper which trusts a reputable newswire which trusts a third party affiliate which inadvertantly gets goatse.

I think this is a really smart move. This could make Yahoo search something more enjoyable to use than Google. I personally like the added 'widgets; of Ask search but their results aren't as good. I think Yahoo is much closer in quality to Google so something like this could really help them.