The first few SearchMonkey (no relation) applications have quickly made their way to being part of Yahoo Search. It's an important signal from the number two search engine: Yahoo wants you to do their innovation for them, but they also want you to get the rewards.
LinkedIn and Yelp are the first third-party sites to have enhanced search results included automatically. Over the last few weeks Yahoo has tested various SearchMonkey applications to see how ordinary users interact with the rich results.
What does this mean for you? If you make something users want, Yahoo will unleash it upon the masses.
Here's how Yelp and LinkedIn SearchMonkey applications work. When searching for a restaurant on Yahoo, anywhere Yelp results would normally be displayed, users instead see a breakout box with address, review info, and more.
Yelp does not get result order preference, but as any eBayer will tell you, enhancements get noticed. Yahoo says they've seen as high as 15% more clicks on SearchMonkey results.
It's common for companies to let outside mashups and add-ons fuel their own internal innovations. Yahoo is doing that, but in a more open way. Rather than blatantly stealing your work, SearchMonkey provides a means to easily bring your work into the search results fold.
That's a small difference, yet at the same time huge. You get the credit for what you do. If the SearchMonkey application is for your own site, you get increased traffic.
Yes, we've discussed before that this may not be the most open standard, but it's a start. Perhaps the foundation for SearchMonkey will be accepted by other search engines. Heck, before sitemaps became a standard, it looked very Google-centric.
You don't only have to hope for Yahoo's approval, either. For power searchers, Yahoo lets you customize your experience, including which SearchMonkey applications are included in your results. Even better, Yahoo lets you turn off LinkedIn and Yelp, if that's what you want.
What do you think--is Yahoo opening up their innovation in a good way, or are there better approaches to let developers have a say in the next generation of search results?
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