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 [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Universal Search | Microsoft: Bing | Search Features: Enhanced Listings | Yahoo: Search Monkey

I've been playing around with Yahoo!'s slick new SearchMonkey Application Platform which was first introduced by Amit Kumar, Director of Product Management at Yahoo! Search, at the SMX West conference earlier this spring. Yahoo! hosted a Developer Launch Party yesterday in Sunnyvale to open the platform up to all developers. I created an example application for the Search Engine Land site, so read on for a description of the platform. SearchMonkey allows publishers to develop a custom layout for their pages' search result listings — instead of just a title hyperlinked to your pag [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Yahoo: Search Monkey

Today, Yahoo! is making its SearchMonkey developer platform publicly available and is kicking things off with a launch party and a developer challenge. As we noted a few weeks ago when SearchMonkey launched in private beta, Yahoo! is encouraging the use of microformats and semantic web standards by providing an infrastructure that developers can use to build applications (using the structured data from web sites). Specifically, developers can create two types of "enhanced listings" for web sites. Generally, searchers will have to opt-in to the enhanced listings for a particular site [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Yahoo: Search Monkey

Yahoo's relatively new CTO Ari Balogh expanded upon Yahoo's "open" initiatives in a keynote speech to the Web2.0 conference yesterday. There's a very extensive discussion, including a video of the keynote, on the TechCrunch site (additional coverage in Search Engine Journal). The SearchMonkey beta is the first step in executing on the strategy, which will roll out in increments over the next several months. The "OS" part is not "operating system" but "open strategy." Beyond openness, the themes of Balogh's talk were making Yahoo more social, more consistent and unified, more personal, and eve [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Yahoo: APIs | Yahoo: General | Yahoo: Other | Yahoo: Search | Yahoo: Search Monkey | Yahoo: User Interface

Today, Yahoo! is providing a "limited preview" of a tool that enables developers to create SearchMonkey applications. Yahoo! CTO Ari Balogh will be unveiling the tool at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco today, and more details are available in the Yahoo! Search Blog. Yahoo! first announced SearchMonkey in February at SMX West, and followed up with more details in March. Yahoo! will hold a developer day on May 15th as a formal kickoff. For now, you can sign up to be included in the preview. Below, more about SearchMonkey and what's available in the new developer tool. SearchMonkey en [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Yahoo: Search Monkey

Two weeks ago at SMX West, Yahoo! announced a new project code named "Search Monkey" that would enable content owners (and in some cases, searchers) to add rich content to search results. Today, Yahoo has released additional details about the program, which has not yet launched. The announcement describes how developers can provide Yahoo with this rich content about their sites by either including structured markup in their pages or by submitting structured feeds. In addition, Yahoo! is announcing a "developer ecosystem for search" so third-party developers can create " [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Yahoo: Search Monkey | Yahoo: SEO