Back in April we covered the web 2.0 expo announcement of Yahoo’s Search Monkey, a search result modification API. Now Yahoo is making the bold step of bringing a small group of Search Monkey applications into the default search results space. My prediction: Yahoo is evolving into a specialty search company.
When announced, Search Monkey was Yahoo’s early days search tool that summed up the company’s commitment to an open application development platform. Programmers working in the Search Monkey space were able to create specialized results within the Yahoo search application. If, for example, you run a restaurant and you wanted your chef’s three best entries listed with your name in the results, it could be done in Search Monkey. The catch was, people using Yahoo needed to install your Search Monkey app into their Yahoo profile in order to see the special results. That was, at least, before now.
Yelp and LinkedIn are the first two companies outside of Yahoo to have their Search Monkey applications added to the default search engine for Yahoo. The specialized look that Yelp and LinkedIn developed for their searches will now be in every Yahoo search result by default, meaning every Yahoo search page with Yelp or LinkedIn results will be serving up rich, contextualized information. I have to believe that other companies are seeing this as their best chance to help push their unique content out to one of the big three search engines.
This move begins what I feel is an important journey for Yahoo to distinguish itself from Google and Microsoft. User generated search results like Search Monkey may give Yahoo a speciality search advantage. If you know that Yelp (a resturant recommendation site) has more informative results in Yahoo, you’re going to start using Yahoo for your resturant searches. While it remains to be seen how many Search Monkey apps Yahoo brings into the fold, this is likely only the beginning. Yahoo’s press release suggested that both the Yelp and LinkedIn app were seeing 15% click-thru rates when tested in an A-B group, which is a very high percentage in search. It seems logical to me that as long as your app has a high rate, and your content is well structured for semantic markup (a requirement for Search Monkey to work properly. See Microformats), you too may find your user-created search layout added into Yahoo’s main trunk some day. Now you just have to contextualize your site’s content and write your custom Search Monkey application. Need any help?
The post Yahoo delivering on user created potential in search appeared first on Sazbean.