Under new CEO Carol Bartz, Yahoo will now try to wring some money from the biggest BOSS users. The company announced a somewhat complicated that will keep BOSS free for most of its users, but will charge heavy users who run more than 10,000 BOSS queries per day to Yahoo's servers. The rate goes up for more computation-heavy requests, such as spell checking or search results beyond the first ten. (Yahoo's servers keep the first ten results for popular search terms cached, rather than searching for them in a database again and again.)

There's another important change in the announcement: "We are no longer restricting developers from monetizing their products using third-party platforms." That means small-scale entrepreneurs can get Yahoo results for free and use them to make money on their own sites. The company's goals are obvious: Generate revenue from big sites, and lock out everywhere else.