Yahoo! SearchMonkey (often misspelled Search Monkey) was a

Yahoo! Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, and its a ...

service which allowed developers and site owners to use structured data to make Yahoo! Search results more useful and visually appealing, and drive more relevant traffic to their sites. The service was shut down in October 2010 along with other Yahoo! services as part of the Microsoft and Yahoo! search deal. The name SearchMonkey is an homage to

Greasemonkey Greasemonkey is a userscript manager made available as a Mozilla Firefox extension. It enables users to install scripts that make on-the-fly changes to web page content after or before the page is loaded in the browser (also known as augmen ...

. Officially the product name has no space and two capital letters. Yahoo! SearchMonkey was selected as one of the top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008.

Default apps

SearchMonkey had many default "apps" enabled; some were site-specific while others were

object-based An object-based language is a programming language that provides a construct to encapsulate state and behavior as an object. A language that also supports inheritance or subtyping is classified as object-oriented. Even though object-oriented seems ...

Examples

Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog on Amazon

Inline Rick Rolls

Thai food on yelp

SearchMonkey on wikipedia

Person search

Creating apps

Apps were made through th
SearchMonkey Developer Tool
. Two types of apps were possible, ones that overwrote the result (Result Apps) and others that displayed below a result (Infobars). App creation was split into two parts, data and presentation.

Data

The data for an app could be either cached or run-time. Run-time data was limited to infobars, as an external fetch would take too long for the search page to render. Pages could be scraped using

XSLT XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) is a language originally designed for transforming XML documents into other XML documents, or other formats such as HTML for web pages, plain text, or XSL Formatting Objects. These formats c ...

or via a

web services A web service (WS) is either: * a service offered by an electronic device to another electronic device, communicating with each other via the Internet, or * a server running on a computer device, listening for requests at a particular port over a n ...

call. Any webservice could be queried using a URL Template combined with any cached data. Webservices could be chained to query multiple sources and aggregate them onto the search page. Cached data could come from a variety of sources using standard markup and vocabularies. *

Microformat Microformats (μF) are predefined HTML markup (like HTML classes) created to serve as descriptive and consistent metadata about elements, designating them as representing a certain type of data (such as contact information, geographic coor ...

s *

RDFa RDFa or Resource Description Framework in Attributes is a W3C Recommendation that adds a set of attribute-level extensions to HTML, XHTML and various XML-based document types for embedding rich metadata within web documents. The Resource Descript ...

* eRDF
SearchMonkey Feeds
Any data placed on a webpage in these formats would be picked up by Yahoo!'s crawlers and made available to app writers. This data was also available through Yahoo! BOSS
YQL wrapped query
o

). One could use th
Structured Data Display
app to see all the structured data with search results.

Presentation

The data was transformed into the display template using

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared towards web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by the PHP Group. ...

hosted on Yahoo! servers. It was a simplified stripped down version of the language.

End of Life

In 2010, Yahoo shutdown SearchMonkey in favor of Microsoft's Bing search engine.

References

External links

SearchMonkey Yahoo! Developer Network

Paul Tarjan's Semantic / SearchMonkey presentation
{{Yahoo! Inc. SearchMonkey