Sunnyvale, California — Google may be out-riding Yahoo Search in terms of market share, but with applications like Search Monkey and BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service), Yahoo is still attempting to innovate in the search space. On Thursday Yahoo announced a deeper integration with Facebook functionality directly into its search results as part of its SearchMonkey open semantic program.
Now, when you perform search for a person on Yahoo, and if they have a public Facebook profile, a link to that profile will show up in search results, along with a pictures and several actions you can take such as: add them as a friend, “poking” them, sending them a message, and viewing their friends.
However, this precisely works well on Facebook profiles that have been made available for indexing by search engines, something Facebook launched in late 2007.
The SearchMonkey program is actually set on by default for all Yahoo Search users now (but you can opt out at any time).
According to Yahoo, Facebook shared this structured data with the SearchMonkey app by adding semantic markup to its public profile pages. In most cases, simply adding that brings up the person’s Facebook listing to the top where it was otherwise showing up on the second or third result pages.
Commenting on the security issues of the application the SearchMonkey Team noted in a blog post: “We care about privacy as much as you do, so you will only see results for Facebook users who have enabled their profiles to be publicly searched and viewed.”
Maybe more importantly, though, features like this show that there is still a plenty of energy left in Yahoo Search. As Marshall Kirkpatrick noted a few weeks ago, things may not be looking too rosy for Yahoo in business terms, but the company is at least trying out a lot of cool search-related technologies.
There are plenty of other social SearchMonkey apps for you to integrate at your own discretion. You can use apps for StumbleUpon, Delicious, Flickr, etc. Find all he apps here.