March 12, 2009

Search Monkey Announces Support for Video, Games, and More

The Yahoo! Search Blog has just posted about how SearchMonkey now allows the embedding of video, documents, and games on the Yahoo! Search results page. Here on the YDN blog, we'd like to highlight a couple of technical notes.

First, this new program represents a significant new feature for SearchMonkey. Up until now, site owners and developers have had to first get their structured data into the Yahoo! Search index, and then go to the SearchMonkey Developer Tool to create a presentation. With this launch, SearchMonkey is starting to provide default treatments for certain types of data. Yahoo! Search is essentially saying, "Here are some patterns of structured data that we understand and will present in a certain way." If you would like to override our default treatment, you can always use the SearchMonkey developer tool to build a custom presentation.

Second, when it comes to understanding patterns of structured data, our approach is that There's More Than One Way To Do It. For example, the announcement on the Yahoo! Search Blog illustrates how to mark up a video using Facebook Share markup:

But you can use W3C standard RDFa to do exactly the same thing, or even include additional data. Here's the equivalent markup in RDFa (namespace declarations omitted for clarity):

In the documentation page for Video objects, we show yet another formulation of the RDFa — the RDFa we need is embedded directly in the