July 15, 2008

SearchMonkey In Paris!

Photo credit Sophie Major

Search Monkey arrived in Paris with the sound of flying toy monkeys screeching as they flew through the La Cantine café. The festive, attentive group gathered to hear about the new Yahoo! Search feature and to fling the little guys across the room.

La Cantine is a cross between an Internet Café and a co-op workspace. Its central Paris location provides space to collaborate, learn, share, and explore the future of technology.

Photo credit Sophie Major

The Yahoo! Developer Network and local Yahoos joined forces to explain Search Monkey; an open interface for providing enhanced search result presentations. Participants were able to start building Search Monkey applications in small groups as well as learn about Microformats.

Search Monkey Applications

Search Monkey allows any developer to create enhanced presentations for a web site when it appears in Yahoo! Search. The standard result displays the page title, description, and web site address. A Search Monkey powered result could contain photographs, address, contact information, deep links to particular pages, and additional information from related pages. This makes search result pages more engaging for users.

Search Monkey applications do this by defining small bits of data that should fill the space. Search Monkey automatically grabs microformatted data on the page, as well as providing the standard Yahoo! Search indexed information. The programmer can also define custom data by scraping the desired page or using web services.

Search Monkey opportunities in France

Museums - Provide images, titles, artist, date, and other information for their objects when they appear in search results.
Traffic - Provide traffic conditions, rates, times, and tourist information when a city or train or metro route appears in the search result pages.
Restaurants - Directories could provide ratings, addresses, phone numbers, and summaries.
Theater - Cinema, Theater, Opera results include times, synopsis, rating, and location information.
Sports - Tour de France and other sports include player information, team scores, upcoming events, and standings.

Ted Drake
Web Developer - Global Finance

Posted at July 15, 2008 10:50 AM

Comments

Posted by: Ido at July 15, 2008 8:16 PM