BOSS is an incredibly useful part of a hackers toolkit. It's fast, very few restrictions and is great for finding arbitrary web content without building your own spiders.

For example, want to search for Twitter and Facebook users by their real names? The right combo of site: and intitle: and BOSS gets you that, see http://overtar.appspot.com

that link is a 404.

Thanks, just updated it.

I was very interested in BOSS and was manuvering to convince my employer to start using it. Then I gave up since I assumed it's days were numbered / it would end up being ruined by MS/Bing (they don't have the best online track record).

Is the "backend" of BOSS not being replaced with Bing?

I wish they would let those who built BOSS run with the idea, or even buy back - or find somebody who wants to invest in - the stuff they programmed...

Out of curiosity, how does Yahoo benefit/profit from BOSS?

Yahoo has a fee structure planned (http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/fees.html) for BOSS.