Thanks to Yahoo’s SearchMonkey, you’ll be able to poke your friends right from a page of Yahoo search results. Yahoo has announced that Facebook enhanced results are now turned on by default across Yahoo search results. This means that any Facebook user who has allowed his/her profile to be publicly viewable and searchable can now be seen in the Yahoo search results with enhanced Facebook data.

Here’s an enhanced result for Danny Sullivan:

The main link points to Danny’s Facebook profile, and there are additional links to add Danny as a friend, view his friends, send him a message, and … what you’ve always wanted to do … poke him!

Facebook is the seventh SearchMonkey app to be turned on for all Yahoo search users. The others are LinkedIn, Yelp, Yahoo Local, Citysearch, Zagat, and Wikipedia.

Yahoo has just announced that the Wikipedia SearchMonkey App is now turned on by default for all Yahoo search users. Wikipedia becomes the sixth app that all Yahoo searchers will see, joining LinkedIn, Yelp, Yahoo Local, Citysearch, and Zagat.

SearchMonkey adds enhanced content to the search results page. The Wikipedia app includes a snippet of text from the Wikipedia article summary, deep links to the first four sections of the article, and a photo if the article has one. Here’s a screenshot that Yahoo provided showing the Wikipedia app in action:

With the new app, Yahoo now joins Google and Live Search in a Wikipedia love triangle. (Quadrangle? Square?) The SEO industry has argued for years that Wikipedia ranks too high, too often in Google’s search results; almost two years ago, we wrote how Google sends Wikipedia tons of traffic. In May of last year, Live Search joined the fray by showing expanded descriptions under Wikipedia results. It’s good to be Wikipedia.

Google is testing a number of changes to its search results, including a way for select publishers to enhance their page descriptions, a way for searchers to jump to sub-sections of a web page and automatically correcting misspelled queries, to some degree. 

Enhanced Listings

The most dramatic of the changes involving reviews of products and services that appear on Yelp, Citysearch, CNET, TripAdvisor and Download.com. The system, which Google has yet to give an official name, allows these publishers to flag data on their web pages that can be extracted and shown within the page’s description in search results. For example:

In the screenshot, you can see how after the page description for this restaurant review on Citysearch, there’s a separate line that allows for a price range to be shown, the number of reviews from Citysearch members and the overall “star” rating of the restaurant.

Behind the scenes, Citysearch is embedding the information for Google to extract within the page itself, using code like this:

<PageMap>
<DataObject type="item">
<Attribute  name="name">Hide Sushi</Attribute>
<Attribute  name="category">Sushi, Japanese, Restaurant</Attribute>
<Attribute name="pricerange">$$</Attribute>
</DataObject>
<DataObject type="review">
<Attribute  name="summary">No fuss, just fish at this neighborhood favorite  get-it-to-go sushi spot.</Attribute>
<Attribute  name="ratingstars">4.5/5</Attribute>
<Attribute  name="ratingcount">55</Attribute>
<Attribute  name="reviewdate">11/26/2008</Attribute>
</DataObject>
</PageMap>

See how the sections in bold correspond to the actual description shown (summary), the price range (pricerange), the number of reviews (ratingcount) and average rating (ratingstars). Any page from one of five test sites using these and other attributes have their descriptions enhanced with the information.

These enhanced listings are similar to Yahoo’s Search Monkey product and part of a continuing trend for search listings to show more than the standard title, description and URL of a web page.

Should you go out and start marking up your pages now? I wouldn’t bother. Right now, enhanced listings at Google only work for the sites in the test program. It won’t help other sites. In addition, the syntax might change or be supplemented with the ability to use standard Microformats.

Supporting Microformats or some way of tagging existing information within a web page would be great. While Yahoo also supports Microformats (and other tagging methods), these still require a developer to go through and create an application that enhances the result.

With Google’s system, no developer knowledge would be required. If you know that a price range is on your existing page, and you add a small bit of HTML code that says in someway to Google “this is the price range,” that’s it — your listing will be enhanced automatically (in cases where Google chooses to do it).

So for now, sit tight until Google announces official support — if they do at all. This remains an experiment that might not go forward as a permanent feature. And no, the enhanced listings will not help boost rankings. Google says the changes are purely a display feature.’

How can you see these enhanced results when searching? You have to be lucky. Right now, they’re only being shown to a select group of searchers picked randomly from those who visit Google who are also in the US. If the experiment is deemed successful, then everyone might see them in the future.

Pagelinks

Another experiment that impacts page descriptions also has no official name, so I’ll give it one — Pagelinks.

We already have something similar to these from Google called Sitelinks. These are the navigational links that appear under a web site’s listing, if it appears in the number one spot. Here’s how they look:

Sitelinks have been out there for ages. Just over a year ago, Google even introduced a way for site owners to control Google Sitelinks to some degree, for their own listings.

When you click on a Sitelink, you are jumped to other pages within the same web site that the listing comes from, key areas that Google thinks are of interest. So what’s different with Pagelinks? Look at the screenshots below:

Notice how there are links after the words “Jump to” right at the beginning of the snippet, embedded in the description? Click on these, and you’ll jump to a place within the page that listed, rather to a completely different page within the site.

Get it? Sitelinks jump you to various places within a particular web site. Pagelinks jump to spots within a particular page itself.

How do you get these? There’s nothing you can do other than to have pages that contain internal anchor links. Don’t know what those are? Look at this page from Wikipedia, which is one of the screenshots above. Scroll down, and you’ll see the Contents area where if you click on a link, that jumps to other places within the page. That’s an anchor link — it jumps you within a page, rather than out of it.

If your page has internal anchors, that makes it eligible to have Pagelinks. Unlike Sitelinks, Pagelinks may show up in descriptions regardless of where a page is listed — Sitelinks only show for pages in the number one spot. And why does a description get a Pagelink and which exact link is selected? Google simply said that it is working on the algorithm that controls all this.

Should you go out and start adding internal anchors? I would do this only if it already makes sense to help your users that need to navigate within a particularly long page. Keep in mind that right now, only a sample of Google searches even see Pagelinks. The experiment might be discontinued. If successful, I think it’s likely we’ll see Pagelinks control come along similar to Sitelinks control. So I’d be in watch-and-see mode, for the moment.

Automatic Spelling Correction

Another change is auto-spelling correction. For years, Google’s offered spelling corrections, the largely much loved “Did you mean” link that appears if you misspell a word. But consider what I see (and some other may see) for larry pge:

See how the “Did you mean” message comes up followed by the words “Top 2 results shown.” What Google is doing is automatically showing you the first two results for the correct spelling [larry page] and then showing the remaining results for [larry pge].

Why make the change?

“This approach gets users to the results they wanted faster. Showing the results of the original query accounts for cases when query correction was undesired,” said Johanna Wright, director of product management at Google.

I think it’s a good change. There was a time when some search engines just automatically corrected spelling, which can seem like the right thing to do, but I always found it kind of annoying. This is a good compromise.

Unlike the other changes, this isn’t an experiment but instead a permanent change being rolled out. Everyone should see it within the next week or two.

In a somewhat related set of experiments, Google’s also testing ads, links and answers within its Google Suggest service. See our separate story, Google Search Suggest Get Ads, Links & Answers, for more about that.

Yahoo has announced the addition of more local business content to their web search results thanks to Yahoo’s SearchMonkey program. Yahoo has turned on the SearchMonkey applications for both Citysearch and Zagat; users don’t have to opt-in to see enhanced content from those sites — it’s now turned on by default for all users.

In fact, four of the five on-by-default SearchMonkey applications have local content. In addition to Citysearch and Zagat, Yahoo Local and Yelp are also showing enhanced listings for all users. (The fifth on-by-default app is LinkedIn.)

This is big news for local businesses: By being listed on these local directory sites, they have a chance to get added exposure in Yahoo’s search results. The enhanced listings offer extra details such as address and phone number, ratings, reviews, business hours, service categories, and even a photo. Enhanced listings from more than one provider might appear, such as in this screenshot below where a Citysearch enhanced listing appears a few spots above one from Yahoo Local.

The details included in each enhanced listing depend on how the provider created its SearchMonkey application. In the example above, Citysearch includes links to the business profile, reviews, a map, and “Write a Review.” Yahoo Local includes links to Maps/Directions, Reviews, and a “Send to Friend” link. Citysearch shows business hours, while Yahoo Local doesn’t.

Local businesses can take advantage of this by:

• making sure they’re listed on Yahoo Local, Citysearch, Yelp, and Zagat (these are the four with enhanced listings on Yahoo)
• completing their business profiles with as much detail as possible
• encouraging customers to leave ratings and reviews on these sites

In an earlier announcement about SearchMonkey applications, Yahoo said their internal tests showed an increase in click-through rate of as much as 15 percent.

In addition to these on-by-default applications, users can visit the Yahoo Search Gallery to install other SearchMonkey applications.

Wikia Search, the “open source” search engine that launched to great fanfare earlier in the year, has introduced a new platform (Wikia Intelligent Search Extensions or “WISE”) that allows third parties to provide an enhanced search result—known as a “WISEApp”—for specific keywords.

WISEApps allow publishers or searchers to enhance search results, in a similar way to Yahoo’s Search Monkey or Google’s SiteLinks enhancements.

For example, the Washington Post WISEApp provides people searching for specific information, such as “Barack Obama” or “John McCain”, with relevant news stories from washingtonpost.com directly within the Wikia Search results page.

Other companies introducing WISEApp’s today are:

• AccuWeather.com: provides people searching for local weather information with full, graphically-enhanced, three-day weather forecasts directly within search results
• AcronymFinder: provides acronyms, abbreviations and meanings for relevant queries
• Amie Street: provides information on independent music for relevant queries
• Creative Commons: provides Creative Commons-licensed images for relevant queries
• Digg: provides recent front page Digg stories for relevant queries
• Indeed: provides job listings for relevant queries
• Kayak.com: provides people searching for information to complete a travel itinerary with the ability to set basic parameters for their trip directly from Wikia Search results pages
• Last.fm: provides band, artist, and song information for relevant queries
• Polar Rose: provides digital photo results for relevant queries
• Thomson Reuters: provides people with financial news for various companies
• Twitter: provides relevant Tweets for various queries
• PleaseDress.me: provides details on tee-shirts for relevant queries
• Snooth: gives people searching for wine direct access to Snooth ratings, pricing and related information directly within Wikia Search results
• Yelp: gives people searching for information on a wide range of local businesses—including restaurants, bars, hotels and more—Yelp ratings and reviews directly within Wikia Search results

More information about WISEApps can be found on the Wikia Search site.

Like many before it, most recently Mahalo, Wikia Search has introduced a Firefox toolbar, called “Wikia Evolution,” to expand the site’s reach and engage more users in the process of adding and annotating search results.

In the notes, it suggests that Google is taking a page from its community playbook: “Already, we’re the cutting edge when it comes to incorporating user feedback into our search results, so much so that Google is experimenting with eerily similar features.”

The new Wikia toolbar allows users to add URLs/pages to the Wikia index (from wherever they are online) and edit or annotate the descriptions and titles of those pages. Users are asked to associate keywords and URLs:

While perhaps simplifying the process of adding to the Wikia index, the toolbar is primarily designed to attract participation and input from users who might be interested in or sympathetic to the Wikia project but use Google or Yahoo as their main search engines.

As I reported last week, Yahoo SearchMonkey applications are now available to searchers. The Yahoo Search blog posted details last night, saying that searchers can now add SearchMonkey applications via either the gallery (which is in beta) or through promoted links from application developers or web sites. The gallery contains only 39 applications so far (only a select subset of applications make it to the gallery), and several are from Yahoo properties.

It’s unclear if the remaining gallery applications were created by third-party developers or by the web site owners (several are simply credited as "Yahoo! user"). Applications exist for popular sites such as Yelp, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, and StumbleUpon.

We’ve reported about SearchMonkey several times from a developer perspective (see, for instance, Yahoo! Launched SearchMonkey Developer Tool and Creating An Enhanced Listing), but how does the searcher experience rate?

Personalized search experience
I love the idea of additional details in the search results for things I care about. It’s like personalized search results that I have control over. Generally, when search engines surface expanded information in search results, it’s based on what will improve the search experience for most searchers (for instance, Live Search’s expanded Wikipedia listing, Google’s local listings, and Yahoo!’s shopping results. But with SearchMonkey applications, I can tailor my search results with expanded information that will improve my search experience specifically. I can add applications relevant to my interests and turn off enhancements that end up being a distraction.

I would turn off Google’s local listings if I could, because a title and phone number don’t help me as much as the search results title and description, which means the 10 local links above the search results are in my way. I don’t have that option, as Google displays these types of enhanced results based on overall searcher behavior, not my individual ones. For local results, Google has thus far concluded that most searchers find them useful. For video playback, Google found that not enough searchers wanted the feature, so those who used it no longer have it available to them.

The idea of adding these applications is not unlike adding Facebook applications to make your Facebook experience exactly as you like it. It is even likely to motivate me to use Yahoo! search more often. If I can find SearchMonkey applications that enable me to customize my search experience exactly as I like it (and applications for LinkedIn, Yelp, Flickr, and other sites I visit frequently are a big step in that direction), then my Yahoo! results will be substantially differentiated from my Live Search or Google results.

However…

Obstacles to search experience customization
The discoverability of this feature is so low that I find it unlikely to gain adoption by enough searchers to make it worthwhile for anyone to create applications for it. Few searchers ever change default settings, and fewer still go looking to see if customizations are available. And Yahoo! has made this feature difficult to both find and use.

You can’t add applications before you begin searching. It appears that you can only reach the SearchMonkey gallery by performing a search and then choosing the Customize link. Some searchers may be looking to customize their experience before they begin searching, but when they are on the search results page, they are midway into task completion and are unlikely to interrupt that task (searching for something) for another, lower priority one (customizing the search experience).

Even if the searcher did decide to take a break from the task at hand, it’s unclear what "customize" even means in the context of search results. All the searcher has to go on is the anchor text "customize". Customize this particular search result? Your overall Yahoo! account? And clicking the link doesn’t clear things up all that much. You can "browse the gallery" or "manage settings". What gallery and what settings are questions only answered by the adventurous souls who just keep clicking.

If you choose "manage settings", which you just might do if you have no idea what the gallery is, you are presented with a Yahoo! Search Preferences page that lists "enhancements" but provides no description of what those are or how to add new ones.

If you choose "browse the gallery", you are sent to a "Search Gallery" page with a list of "All Enhancements" that again give no context for what might happen with any of them.

The help information provides more detail, but the few who make it this many clicks are even less likely to see the tiny help link and then click again on the question about what enhanced results are. (It takes a minimum of five clicks to get to information that explains what enhanced search results are, and that’s if you already know where to click.)

If you decide to take the blind plunge and add some enhancements in the gallery, you are presented with an unorganized list of applications that’s not alphabetized or categorized by topic. This presentation is manageable with only 39 applications, but could become unwieldy fairly quickly. (You can filter by category or sort by various factors, which should help.)

The search gallery
The gallery has other usability problems. You can’t click from the application description to the site, although you can click into the application details, view the domain, open a new browser tab, and type the address in manually (although even the URL display is a bit confusing).

This shortcoming isn’t an issue with most of the current applications because they are for well-known sites, but as developers create applications from lesser-known sites, the inability to easily check out the site in question further hinders adoption.

You can’t tell if the application listed is an enhanced listing or an info bar until you click into the deeper description. This also makes customization a bit more cumbersome if you prefer one or the other and just want to scan the list and quickly add applications. The list also doesn’t provide an indication of what you’ve already added unless you click through to the details.

A far more usable gallery would be categorized, include a link to the site, an icon or other indicator of the application type, and apps that are already added would be grayed out or otherwise distinguished.

(Yahoo! told me that they are working on an enhancement that indicates “official” applications created by site owners who have authenticated their ownership via Site Explorer, so improvements are in the works.)

In addition to adding applications from the gallery, you can also add applications from promotion links on other sites. For instance, LinkedIn could provide a link on their site for the LinkedIn application and third-party developers could make libraries of their own available. I wasn’t able to find examples of this type of promotion. Even the Yahoo! properties that have applications in the gallery (such as Yahoo! Autos) aren’t promoting those applications on their pages. (A few companies have blogged about their SearchMonkey applications, but they haven’t added the information to their sites.)

Benefiting from a customized search experience
Once you have added some enhancements, you have to be logged in to use them. This is a reasonable requirement, but unfortunately, there’s no way to log in from the Yahoo! search home page. There’s not even a straightforward login option on the Yahoo! home page, just a prompt to log in to Yahoo! mail. I don’t have a Yahoo! mail account, but it’s either click that or go to Flickr, log in there, and come back to Yahoo! for my search.

I generally have found the enhanced listings themselves to be very useful, but the controls around them are a bit cumbersome. The arrow below the result that expands to show the info bar is directly beside the remove application icon and it’s easy to click the wrong one.

Enhanced listings have a help icon and remove application icon that are only visible if you hover to the right of the listing.

Some enhanced listings seem to show up automatically, while others only appear if you click to expand them. And data isn’t always available, as shown below for Yahoo! autos.

Site owner options for opting-out
As I noted last week, some site owners may be worried about lowered click-through rates if their site’s listing includes additional details. If searchers can get all the information they need from the search results, they may not need to visit the site, which could result in fewer overall page views. (It could also potentially increase page views as the additional information may make the listing more compelling and could deepen the overall customer relationship.)

Amit Kumar, Product Management Director of Yahoo! Search, agreed and brought up another point when I asked about this — that much like other types of blended search results (like video and images) that may draw the searcher’s attention and cause those listings to be clicked more often than higher-ranked listings, enhanced listings could have the same effect.

We believe that showing relevant structured data from sites in the context of their search results will only result in increased engagement with those sites. Users engage with brands and sites that they find relevant – and in the context of search, that translates to sites that are helping them be more productive, to get their tasks done faster.

Rich results through SearchMonkey also encourage users to scan the entire page – instead of just focusing on the top result or two. This, again, increases engagement with sites that appear lower in the search rankings – increasing their click-through rates.

Quality of traffic is another aspect here – a better window to the landing page ensures that the traffic the sites get is actually qualified. We do a great job with contextual summaries, but it’s hard to beat a photo, that shows up next to your LinkedIn result, that tells you at a glance if this is the person you’re looking for, or not.

That said, Yahoo! help documentation acknowledges that some site owners might not be happy about third-parties developing applications for their sites and might want to opt-out of the program.

It is possible that SearchMonkey’s data extraction will end up driving additional user traffic to your site. However, if you feel that this data extraction is abusive, there is a couple of ways to block it.

You can either block the Yahoo! Search Monkey user agent at the server level (they provide instructions only for Apache) or you can email a list of URLs with your contact information to osp.optout@yahoo.com. They note that because SearchMonkey isn’t a web crawler, it doesn’t follow Robots Exclusion Protocol directives, so blocking the user agent using robots.txt or robots meta tags won’t be effective. (It’s unclear if these blocking methods cause the application to no longer be available for searchers or the additional data simply will no longer display in the search results.)

Strong future potential
The SearchMonkey searcher experience is in beta, so Yahoo! is likely working to improve the overall usability. Their blog post notes:

The launch of the Yahoo! Search Gallery is just the first step in making SearchMonkey applications available and easy to use for consumers. This is the first phase of a larger plan to provide opportunities for viral distribution of SearchMonkey apps. We’re continuing to develop new ways to surface and share useful and high-performance applications in users' search experience and more broadly on the web, so expect more in the near future.

If Yahoo! can make SearchMonkey applications more discoverable, they might help searchers create the perfect search experience, which might convince them to use Yahoo! a little more often.

Last week, Microsoft Live Search expanded the description that appears below Wikipedia results and added navigational links to major headings within the Wikipedia article. Google has long been gently mocked by the search marketing community for ranking Wikipedia results highly for a large percentage of queries, but the general searching population tends to find these results useful. Microsoft must have found that their searchers find Wikipedia results particularly valuable for their queries to have implemented special treatment for them.

Below is the Wikipedia result for the query breakfast at tiffany's on Live Search. The description that appears below the title is twice as long as standard descriptions and links to sections within the Wikipedia article are listed horizontally below the text.

Below more details about the expanded Wikipedia listing, as well as on the overall trend of all the major search engines showing increased details on the results pages and what that might mean for site owners who are worried about lowered click-through rates.

Microsoft Live Search Expanded Wikipedia Listings
Wikipedia appears to be the only site that is receiving these expanded listings, although since the infrastructure is now in place for this type of special handling, I wouldn't be surprised to see this display used for other sites as well. The links below the description differ from standard sitelinks that appear for many sites on all the major search engines in that they link to sections of a single page (whereas sitelinks link to other pages within a site) and they appear regardless of the position of the listing (sitelinks tend to appear only if the listing is the first result).

At first glance, this new treatment may seem like a special advantage for Wikipedia, but it's just as likely that the searcher is now more likely to get an answer on the search engine results page  (SERP) itself and may not need to click through to the Wikipedia page. The click through rate could theoretically go down with this new display. Search marketers with sites listed in the search results for queries that return a Wikipedia page may also find reduced click-through behavior to their sites if the Wikipedia listing provides the answer to the query.

Search Engines Continue Evolving Search Experience
This move is one of many user interface changes that the search engines have been making in an effort to fulfill their primary goal of providing searchers with exactly what they're looking for as quickly as possible. Some of these changes, such as Google's recent launch of site search on the search results page, have made some search marketers fear that they're losing visitors and content that once was only available by clicking through to sites is now available on Google itself.

However, from a marketing perspective, any interaction with your brand raises awareness, and while interaction on the SERP is clearly more difficult (if not impossible) to measure than a search referral, that interaction is still valuable. In some cases, it may be more valuable, if the user associates the positive experience of a quick answer with your brand. With that in mind, it's more important than ever to ensure both your brand and primary message are prominent in your title tag and meta description tag.

Yahoo!'s SearchMonkey
Yahoo! is, in some ways, taking this idea one step further by enabling anyone to create enhanced listings for a site's search results with their new SearchMonkey program. A site's users will be able to opt-into those enhanced listings and subsequently may often get enough information from the SERP that they often won't need to click through to the site. For instance, a Yelp enhanced listing developed someone identified only as a "Yahoo! user" is available in the SearchMonkey gallery and opting in to that causes Yelp results in Yahoo! to look like this:

Yelp users may find that an enhanced listing with a ratings summary, address, and hours for a restaurant is information enough. On the one hand, this could mean fewer page views (and thus, lower ad revenue). On the other hand, it could mean increased loyalty and branding that may ultimately cause users to visit the site and contribute to it more often (and thus, higher ad revenue).

A Wikipedia SearchMonkey application is available as well (also seemingly developed by a third-party), although it's more understated that the Live Search display. A SearchMonkey-enhanced Wikipedia result on Yahoo! has a simple arrow below it, which if you click on it, opens to a full table of contents for the article.

Google Discontinues Video Playback in Search Results
Not all search engine attempts to make the search results experience richer for users will be successful. As the engines start to experiment beyond the standard ten blue links, they'll presumably find that some aren't as useful for searchers or are too poorly received by site owners. Google, for instance, introduced a video playback feature directly in Google's search results, as part of its universal search behavior, but that feature is no longer available. A Google spokesperson told me:

"We are constantly experimenting with new features to help improve the search experience. When some features — such as the "Watch Video" link – aren't as useful as we want them to be, we remove them and go back to experimenting. We'll continue to try out new features in order to provide the most useful and relevant search experience for our users."

Before:

Now:

You can, however, still watch videos in their entirety on the Yahoo! search results page.

Microsoft Live Search handles video playback in the SERP a little differently, possibly in an attempt better meet the needs of the searcher who likely doesn't want to watch full videos from the results page, but just wants to determine if the video is the one they're looking for before they click through to the video page. If you hover over a video thumbnail, the video jumps to "highlights".

Evolving the Customer Relationship
Search engines will continue to experiment with ways to enhance the searcher experience, which is clearly a win for searchers. If search marketers and site owners view the search results page as another way to engage with customers, they can benefit as well. The way the site is presented in the search results will continue to gain importance and we may need to find new ways of measuring search effectiveness beyond click through.