Yahoo SearchMonkey
| Company type | Service |
|---|---|
| Industry | Internet, Search engine |
| Founded | May 2008 |
| Defunct | October 2010 |
| Fate | Terminated following Microsoft and Yahoo! search deal |
| Products | Structured data-enhanced search results |
| Owner | Yahoo! |
Yahoo! SearchMonkey was a service introduced by Yahoo! in May 2008 that allowed developers and website owners to incorporate structured data, enhancing the appearance and functionality of Yahoo! Search results to attract more targeted visitors. This offering was terminated in October 2010 following the Microsoft and Yahoo! search deal. The branding "SearchMonkey," written as a single word with two capital letters, was inspired by Greasemonkey.
In 2008, SearchMonkey earned recognition as one of the leading Semantic Web products.
Default apps
The platform included a variety of built-in "apps," some tailored to specific sites and others based on objects, all designed to improve how search results were displayed.
Examples
- Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog featured on Amazon
- Embedded Rick Rolls within YouTube
- Thai cuisine listings on Yelp
- SearchMonkey-enhanced results on Wikipedia
- Person searches such as for Paul Tarjan
Creating apps
Developers utilized the SearchMonkey Developer Tool to build applications. There were two categories: Result Apps, which replaced the standard search output, and Infobars, which appeared beneath the results. App creation involved two key elements: sourcing data and designing its presentation.
Data
Data for apps could be either cached or retrieved in real-time; however, real-time data was restricted to infobars due to rendering limitations. Data extraction methods included XSLT-based web scraping or invoking web services. Multiple web services could be linked together to combine diverse data sources. Cached information originated from structured markup formats such as:
- Microformats
- RDFa
- eRDF
- SearchMonkey Feeds
These formats were crawled by Yahoo!'s indexing systems, making the data accessible to developers and available through Yahoo! BOSS APIs. The Structured Data Display app provided a way to visualize structured data within search listings.
Presentation
Data transformation into display templates was handled using a simplified version of PHP, executed on Yahoo!'s servers.
End of Life
In 2010, Yahoo ceased support for SearchMonkey as part of its transition to incorporating Microsoft's Bing search technology.