One of the latest tools from Yahoo!’s Developer Network (YDN) is SearchMonkey. Basically it’s a way where you can write some code that will ‘optimise‘ how the SERPS are displayed. Things that can be done for example is say you are searching and a Wikipedia result comes out, you link directly to the citings at the end of the page (which are normally better than the article in the first place). Monkeys can work with RDF, microformats and XLST, to extrapolate extra info from the page.
Currently the process runs something like this::
- You create a Monkey, and release it into the wild.
- If it’s good Yahoo! could include it in there MonkeyGallery.
- A Yahoo! visitor(when logged in) can add your monkey.
- When the user searches, your Monkeys attributes will be seemlessly be passed and displayed in the search.
Currently there are monkeys to enhance when you search IMDB, StumbleUpon, Facebook, etc in the gallery. So these extra features will only be shown once a result is returned for the domain you have targeted your monkey to (and the user has installed you App). From the SEO perspective this could be something where you can bump up a clients CTR by catching the attention of the user that little bit better.
SearchMonkey seems to offer many great ways to improve how search results are displayed. One good application could be for larger corporations who know their staff sometimes need to search their public internet webpage differently to a normal visitor.
Right now each new application is checked by the Yahoo! team, so things like affiliate links will probably not make it into the gallery, but of course you are free to do some yourself and share from there. Yahoo probably won’t install your monkey as a default monkey, but in the future you will be able to use the SearchMonkeys with BOSS. BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) basically is an API where you can create your own ‘version’ of search results. So it will be possible to make your own version of Yahoo search, and then enhance it to look nicer and possibly pulling in 3rd party data and adding that to the result. (fingers crossed for a BOSS event in Munich soon)
Last night in Munich there was a presentation about SearchMonkey given by Neil Crosby from Yahoo!. Which brought us through some of the steps to creating the Monkeys. In fact I was pleasantly surprised how Neil, backed up by Guy Hepworth & Chris Heilmann, were really open about answering my many questions about what a Monkey can and can’t do.
Also it was great to meet some of the nice German wed devs / SEOs like : Thomas / Uwe (thanks for finding me when I was lost) / Christian .
