Yahoo Offers Search, Ad-Supported Games

Yahoo has announced it plans to let other companies build custom Web services on its search technology...and it's now offering a slew of ad-supported online games.

Yahoo might be facing a showdown with investors at its annual meeting in August, but the company is continuing to roll out new initiatives designed to promulgate its technologies into businesses and organizations—and get their name in front of Internet-users eyeballs.

First up, Yahoo has announced a new open Web services platform dubbed Yahoo Search BOSS—Build Your Own Search Service—that will let third parties significant access to Yahoo’s search technology, including the ability to build custom search engines with their own unique presentations and re-rank search results. BOSS users won’t have any restriction on the number of queries they can fire off, and they cam mix results fro Web sites, news, images, and other data sources indexed by Yahoo.

“Today, the search market is generally limited to three major search engines to drive innovation and growth,” said Yahoo chief search strategist Prabhakar Raghavan, in a statement. “BOSS opens up the playing field for developers and companies to disrupt the search market, become principals in search and build new Web search experiences that offer more choice for users.”

Yahoo also plans to add monetization capability to BOSS, enabling Yahoo search advertising and other revenue models for developers.

But Yahoo’s also made a move that might have more direct significance to everyday Internet users: games. Yahoo has announced that Yahoo Games no offers more than 400 ad-supported downloadable games from leading casual games publishers like Big Fish, PopCap, GameHouse, Anarchy, iWin, and many others. Yahoo has partnered with Double Fusion and NeoEdge to (respectively) sell and integrate pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll video advertising in the games. Double Fusion will work on connecting games (and their associated demographics) with advertisers, while NeoEdge’s NeoARM technology actually inserts ads into the games without requiring any access to the games’ source code.

Advertisers will likely be particularly keen to tap into the online casual gaming market, which is generally considered to have strong reach among females between the ages of 35 to 54. So, when playing Yahoo’s ad-supported online games, don’t be surprised to see ads for shoes.