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May 15, 2008
Original post featured on Yahoo! Search Blog
It's been three weeks since we began the limited preview of Yahoo! Search's new open developer platform, SearchMonkey. Today, we're officially opening up the doors to all developers -- professionals and hobbyists -- to begin building applications that enhance the usefulness and relevance of search results.
There are three components to this open ecosystem:
So, what's in it for developers?
With SearchMonkey, developers have a hand in shaping the next generation of search by building customized search results and mash-ups that users can add to their Yahoo! Search experience. By leveraging structured data from sites like CitySearch, StumbleUpon, eBay, or Epicurious.com, developers can add navigational links, reviews, contact information, and even locations to provide enhanced search listings.
Developers can build two types of applications using SearchMonkey: Enhanced Results and Infobars. Enhanced Results replace the current standard results with a richer display. 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).
The process for building SearchMonkey applications is very straightforward:
Announcing the SearchMonkey Developer Challenge
To foster innovation and creativity on the SearchMonkey platform, we're hosting a good old-fashioned competition. The SearchMonkey Developer Challenge will recognize innovative applications within four categories: Best Enhanced Result, Best Infobar, Most Innovative Use of Structured Data, Best Data Service, and Grand Prize (best over all categories). You have until June 14th to submit your applications for a chance to win up to $10,000.
And don't forget to come kick things off with us this evening at the SearchMonkey Developer Launch Party. Catch live demos, meet the product team and enjoy free food, beer and, of course, schwag at Yahoo!'s headquarters in Sunnyvale, CA.
Whether you can join us for the party or not, keep in touch -- visit our suggestion forum or leave us a comment below. We want to know how the tool is working out for you.
We look forward to evolving web search with you.
Amit Kumar
Director, Product Management
Yahoo! Search
Posted at May 15, 2008 9:04 AM
Yes - you can view the microformats we've indexed through the SearchMonkey developer tool - http://developer.yahoo.com/searchmonkey
Posted by: Amit Kumar at May 15, 2008 4:20 PM
Congratulations on being the first major search site to really support structured search! We'll be building a feed shortly.
One suggestion -- somehow we need to find a way to add a "pricing/availability" element to the structured data mix. I don't see any microformats that let, say, a hotel render all its data together with a URL for finding out whether a resource is avaiable on a certain date, and then booking. Right now, all the microformats tend to deal with single-product, single-person, and relationaship-style elements. What the travel industry needs desperately is for the search engines to publish a way to connect in their "is it available" and "how much is it?" booking API's.
Posted by: Steve Murch at May 15, 2008 9:19 PM
Steve,
Thanks for the kind words :)
So, I'm not sure which site you're from, but if you generally come up in the 10 top results for your intended queries, why don't you write a SearchMonkey application that shows the price and availability? We cache the date for a short period of time (so as not to kill your webserver with requests), but it should still be real-time enough for you to get your user's the information you have.
Try it out on the dev tool, and let us know what you think :) (Amit posted the link above, but I'll give it again for good measure: http://developer.yahoo.com/searchmonkey)
Paul Tarjan
(|): Chief Technical Monkey :(|)
Posted by: Paul Tarjan at May 15, 2008 10:01 PM
Steve -
In addition to microformats, you can use eRDF or RDFa on your site, and thus use existing vocabularies that allow you to embed pricing or availability information.
Our goal is to support widely accepted vocabularies - may of them are listed in our documentation, and we're open to adopting more as they emerge.
Amit
Posted by: Amit Kumar at May 16, 2008 12:19 PM
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