Google and Yahoo will serve search results, but you can bet they will control as much as necessary to assure their profit. BOSS search sites will perhaps become specialized niche search tools that will feed Google and Yahoo new data.

Monetization to the BOSS search portal will be essential for this to work.

Could a BOSS portal become as popular and used as much as Yahoo or even Google in the future?

Is it a spring board opportunity for a BOSS Portal to build its social presence, then seek funding to go independent later?

This will be interesting.

What could arise from developers having the ability to manipulate Yahoo’s results to serve up SERPS? Not just perhaps something that would serve niche search, but maybe there is room for a few developments off this platform to make an in-road into alternative search.

As you point out, if the latter happens, then yahoo would pull off the heist of the century over google. Or, perhaps at least fragment the dominance of google. So long as the monetisation strategy serves google then I doubt their advertising partnership would cease due to such a development.

This could be the equivalent to what Amazon EC & S3 did for starups.