I had the great fortune of having the Yahoo SearchMonkey team speak at last nights Refresh Detroit. Prior to the speaking I really did not have the full grasp on what yahoo! was doing and what the SearchMonkey platform really was. However I learned that it has the very real possibility of changing the way people search and the way we, as web developers, great web pages.
SearchMonkey is a platform that went live on Yahoo! search as of last night, that allows plugins to be written to ENHANCE search results. Meaning that you can turn on/off by preference extra information in the search results. Now of course this doesn’t sound revolutionary, so let me give you an example.
You are searching for information about a movie you may want to rent. Normally you might have to click through 4-5 different websites to get all the details you would like (review, cast, synopsis, and a picture to make sure it is the one you were thinking of).
Yahoo! SearchMonkey would render a listing of the movie with tabs below it that let you quickly open up a viewing area for more information. From there you can tab through the rating/review, the cast, synopsis, etc… with out ever leaving the page.
This is done by people writing plug-ins, or through interpreting the semantic code on the page itself. For example if I know that all upcoming.org events follow the same format, I can configure (and I say configure vs write because Yahoo! makes it very easy) a plugin that extracts the image, the location, the title, a link to the map, and renders them all in the search result.
That plugin can be for my personal use, it can be reviewed for use in the public gallery (anyone can turn it on), and if it gets popular enough it can be turned on by default.
Now the semantic side… SearchMonkey is already going to be using microformats and RDF to pull semantic data out of webpages and will be rendering them in the search results. That means any sites already using hReview will have the bonus of review information showing up in the results. It also means that if you have hCards or hCalendars they will also start to appear in the Yahoo! search results.
This is exciting for many reasons. One it improves the searching experience, by allowing the search engines to provide better data and information that is semantically accurate to those who are looking for specific information. It also will push developers to adopt the semantic web, expand microformats, and get to a point where we can do much more with our websites than we are doing now.
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