Yahoo! SearchMonkey

Yahoo! SearchMonkey

Type of site	semantic search
Available in	English
Owner	Yahoo!
URL	developer.yahoo.com/searchmonkey
Commercial	yes
Registration	no

Yahoo! SearchMonkey (often misspelled Search Monkey) is a Yahoo! service which allows developers and site owners to use structured data to make Yahoo! Search results more useful and visually appealing, and drive more relevant traffic to their sites. The name SearchMonkey is an homage to Greasemonkey. Officially the product name has no space and two capital letters.

Yahoo! SearchMonkey has been selected as one of the top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008.

Default Apps

Currently, there are many default "apps" turned on. Some are site-specific. Others are object-based.

Examples

• Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog on Amazon
• Inline Rick Rolls
• Thai food on yelp
• SearchMonkey on wikipedia
• Person search

Creating Apps

Apps are made through the SearchMonkey Developer Tool. Two types of apps are possible, ones that overwrite the result (Result Apps) and ones the display below a result (Infobars). App creation is split into two parts, data and presentation.

Data

The data for an app may be either cached or run-time. Run-time data is limited to infobars, as an external fetch will take too long for the search page to render. Pages can be Scraped using XSLT or web services may be called. Any webservice may be queried using a URL Template combined with any cached data. Webservices may be chained to query multiple sources and aggregated them onto the search page. Cached data may come from a variety of sources using standard markup and vocabularies.

• Microformats
• RDFa
• eRDF
• SearchMonkey Feeds

Any data placed on a webpage in these formats will be picked up by Yahoo!'s crawlers and made available to app writers. This data is also available through Yahoo! BOSS (YQL wrapped query or documentation).

You can use the Structured Data Display app to see all the structured data right in your search results.

Presentation

The data is transformed into the display template using PHP hosted on Yahoo! servers. It is a simplified stripped down version of the language.

External links

• SearchMonkey Yahoo! Developer Network
• Paul Tarjan's Semantic / SearchMonkey presentation