Sunnyvale, California — Ever since formally announcing a 10 year deal last month that Microsoft’s Bing search engine will be powering Yahoo search, pending approval, many of the tidbits from Yahoo and different developers have been working on as part of the SearchMonkey effort are becoming available to normal searchers and site owners, its program for websites to provide richer search results. The upgrades cover a very wide range of categories, too.
Earlier, SearchMonkey only permitted sites to add “structured data” pointing to videos, games, and documents that would be displayed in the search results — in one of the cooler uses, you could search for a television show that you liked, then play the video from Hulu right on the search page.
Yahoo! Search is automatically switching on a number of new types of SearchMonkey enhanced results: for product, local businesses, reviews, entertainment, social media and tech sites — to better help people search and find what they are looking for faster, a Yahoo representative said in a statement.
SearchMonkey also empowers developers to create applications that offers even more enhancements to the results.
The representative further continued, “Yahoo! Search is introducing a number of custom auto-on SearchMonkey applications for popular entertainment, social networking, reference, and download sites including RottenTomatoes, Netflix, IMDB, Yahoo! Movies, Friendster, Britannica, and FileHippo — all intended to further improve the search experience.”
As you can see a combination of movie-related examples, in addition to an illustration of what sort of results searches for local business should return.
Although not a cosmic-change, but almost similar to SearchMonkey itself, this technology is reasonably impressive and quite useful, and appears to be a promising way to improve search, but will any of this matter after Yahoo switches to Bing?
Well, Yahoo has been insisting that it is not entirely relieving its search technology — while Bing will power Yahoo’s back-end, Yahoo will continue improving its own front-end user experience, the company says. Additional upgrades courtesy of SearchMonkey are supposed to be on the way.