Maybe Yahoo took its naming inspiration from Jonathan Coulton's song “Code Monkey.” Why else would it name its developer platform SearchMonkey? The service, in private beta at the time of writing, allows site owners to customize their Yahoo search result listings. No, you can't move your site up in the rankings other than by the usual ways, but you can customize the way people see your listing.
It's kind of funny to think about it, but we've gotten so used to the ten-links-in-a-list presentation that it can be hard to imagine a different way to show our sites. Fortunately, Mark Hendrickson writing for Techcrunch offers an example of how different your listing can look if you want it to:
As you can see, the “after” version of this restaurant listing links to reviews, photos, ratings, an address and phone number, hints at a price range, and lets you send the link to a friend or your phone. That gives you a whole lot of information before you even click through to the main restaurant link.
I didn't get the chance to check out the SearchMonkey tool myself – and it wouldn't have helped me if I had, because users need to be comfortable with PHP, XSLT, and DataRSS. That said, those who are comfortable with those languages will have no problem with SearchMonkey, according to Hendrickson. Indeed, he thinks that its ease of use and excellent results will lead to SearchMonkey “becoming very popular with website owners big and small.”
The big question, of course, is whether searchers will take to the new format, and that's hard to know in advance. But it does seem to encourage interacting with the listing to do research or spread information around. I could see the “Send to a Friend” link in particular getting a lot of use. It will be interesting to see what happens after Yahoo takes this out of beta and searchers start seeing the change in the look of their results. If you're interested, you can join the developer preview of Yahoo SearchMonkey.
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