“Web portal Yahoo open’s SearchMonkey developer tools that can add reviews, images, ratings and other information to enhance search results.”
Yahoo Inc. on Thursday formally opened its new SearchMonkey development platform that will allow developers community and third-party programmers to begin creating applications to add pertinent information like ratings, reviews, images, contact information and navigational links that will enhance the content that appears in a search listing.
Search Monkey is Yahoo’s first-step to let external developers create programs to enhance its Web search results and, in theory, makes them more appealing and useful.
“We are responding to people’s demands to be able to complete tasks in search results,” said Amit Kumar, Director of Product Management for Yahoo Search. “We are focused on creating a better search experience for our users and want to let developers with an understanding of structured data jump start the system with their apps.”
Silly though it sounds, SearchMonkey really is intended to have a big influence on Yahoo’s future. Developers are being asked to create either “Enhanced Results” or “Infobars,” “Enhanced Results replace the current standard results with a richer display,” explains Kumar on the Yahoo Search Blog.
He then continues, “All the links in the Enhanced Results must point to the site to which the result refers. Infobars are appended below search results and can include metadata about the result, related links or content, or links for user actions (such as adding a movie to a Netflix queue).”
Yahoo had first announced plans for SearchMonkey in February, promising that the new technology would let Web site owners share structured data with Yahoo by using markups, standardized XML feeds, APIs and page extraction. The data distribution will allow third-party developers to build SearchMonkey applications that provide a better experience for users.
“The search engine experience has not changed … it is pretty much the same as when search engines and the Internet were a technical space for academics,” said Kumar. “It is time for search results to experience change and be more useful to users. Search engines have typically been closed; they have been black boxes with little room for innovation. It is time for us to open up this canvas to external parties … opening up one of the last closed areas on the Web.”
Giving an example, he said, a developer could build an application that would include a person’s photo from his Facebook page when someone searches on his name. Or a restaurant listing could be enhanced with user reviews, ratings and directions appearing in the search results.
It is the first component of Yahoo’s broad Open Strategy, announced last month and described as a long-range plan to open all Yahoo sites, online services and Web applications to outside developers, and give users a “social profile” dashboard to unify and manage their Yahoo services.
IDC analyst Susan Feldman called SearchMonkey a “really important” initiative that can differentiate Yahoo from Google. “From a market point of view, that is a great idea,” she said.
From a technology perspective, if users can let Yahoo factor into search what it knows about them, “the experience will be quite different and it should also improve relevance,” Feldman said.
Although there is no plan currently to help developers earn money from the applications they create on SearchMonkey, Kumar predicted that programmers will profit by gaining fame for building applications that attract the attention of future employers.
Yahoo expects to launch a gallery of SearchMonkey application in the next few weeks, Kumar added.
To kick-start and instill developer interest in SearchMonkey, Yahoo today announced the launch of the SearchMonkey Developer Challenge that will award up to $10,000 to developers who create top applications.
Even with the contest, Kumar acknowledged that the execution of SearchMonkey will be a “tough act.” We hope we are doing the right things in terms of disincentives for abuse, the right tools for developers and the right experience for users.
He noted that all applications that are submitted will be reviewed carefully and only those that improve the search experience for users will be approved.