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Original post featured on Yahoo! Search Blog
It's been three weeks since we began the limited preview of Yahoo! Search's new open developer platform, SearchMonkey. Today, we're officially opening up the doors to all developers -- professionals and hobbyists -- to begin building applications that enhance the usefulness and relevance of search results.
There are three components to this open ecosystem:
So, what's in it for developers?
With SearchMonkey, developers have a hand in shaping the next generation of search by building customized search results and mash-ups that users can add to their Yahoo! Search experience. By leveraging structured data from sites like CitySearch, StumbleUpon, eBay, or Epicurious.com, developers can add navigational links, reviews, contact information, and even locations to provide enhanced search listings.
Developers can build two types of applications using SearchMonkey: Enhanced Results and Infobars. Enhanced Results replace the current standard results with a richer display. All the links in the Enhanced Results must point to the site to which the result refers. Infobars are appended below search results and can include metadata about the result, related links or content, or links for user actions (such as adding a movie to a Netflix queue).
The process for building SearchMonkey applications is very straightforward:
Announcing the SearchMonkey Developer Challenge
To foster innovation and creativity on the SearchMonkey platform, we're hosting a good old-fashioned competition. The SearchMonkey Developer Challenge will recognize innovative applications within four categories: Best Enhanced Result, Best Infobar, Most Innovative Use of Structured Data, Best Data Service, and Grand Prize (best over all categories). You have until June 14th to submit your applications for a chance to win up to $10,000.
And don't forget to come kick things off with us this evening at the SearchMonkey Developer Launch Party. Catch live demos, meet the product team and enjoy free food, beer and, of course, schwag at Yahoo!'s headquarters in Sunnyvale, CA.
Whether you can join us for the party or not, keep in touch -- visit our suggestion forum or leave us a comment below. We want to know how the tool is working out for you.
We look forward to evolving web search with you.
Amit Kumar
Director, Product Management
Yahoo! Search
Adding structured data to your site doesn't need to be complicated or difficult. It can be as simple as adding a handful of attributes to your page -- "'class"and "rel" are the most common. Many sites use semantic markup, and already have these attributes, in which case you can insert additional values into existing attributes, since these actually hold space-separated lists. Microformats is the name of one common method for using this kind of simple markup.
Microformats are community-driven standards, put together and maintained by volunteers outside of a formal organization like IETF. Typically, they cover well-worn use cases, a concept called "paving the cowpaths." A number of microformat specifications in various stages of development are available at microformats headquarters.
Initially, the Yahoo! Search indexer supports the following microformats:
* hCard for personal or organization contact info
* hCalendar for event descriptions and timelines
* hAtom for syndicated content as might appear in an RSS feed
* hReview to record review ratings such as "8.5 out of 10"
* XFN to track relationships on the social graph in a lightweight fashion
The Web has a huge number of helpful articles and tutorials on using microformats. If the structured data your site exposes falls into any of categories above, then microformats are probably a good choice for you.
Here's a simple example. If your personal site already has markup like this, pointing to one of your other sites:
<a href="http://myothersite.com/blog">My site</a>
Add XFN with a single attribute, like this:
<a rel="me" href="http://myothersite.com/blog">My site</a>
The value of rel="me" indicates that the other site is also representative of you.
A more involved example requires changes across more than one element. Let's say a page mentions a review of an iPod, like this:
<div>Overall, I give the iPod a rating of 8 (out of 10)</div>
To add hReview markup to this, a few additional wrapper elements are needed, like this:
<div class="hreview">
Overall, I give the
<span class="item">
<span class="fn">iPod</span>
</span>
a rating of
<span class="rating">
8
</span>
(out of
<span class="best">
10
</span>
)
</div>
This is simplified markup. Consult the microformats.org site for specific details. In general, these changes indicate that the overall structure is a review ("hReview"), that the item being reviewed is an iPod (additional details such as a URL are helpful), and the rating is 8 out of a possible 10.
What if your structured markup needs go beyond the list of supported microformats? Please provide us with feedback, as we are continuously evaluating and adding support for additional microformats. On the other hand, you might want to consider using more expressive RDF markup. If you want to expose structured data but aren't ready (or able) to make site changes yet, then you might consider writing a custom data service. Stay tuned, we'll cover these topics in future blog posts.
By the way, we'll be talking about microformats among other things later today (Thursday, May 15) at the SearchMonkey Launch Party at Yahoo!'s Sunnyvale headquarters. Here are the details – join us for a bit of SearchMonkey talk and a plenty of beer, food, and schwag.
Micah Dubinko
SearchMonkey Team Alumnus
Note: This blog post was originally published on the Yahoo! Local & Maps Blog.
Like the London Tube Map, recording and retrieval of locations and their relationships doesn’t always have to do with their Lat/Lon. There is a more elegant way to abstract the relationships of location, and unambiguously describe places in a permanent, language-neutral manner. Since Where on Earth joined Yahoo! in 2005, Yahoo! has geo-enabled the network, including geo-tagging advertising, Flickr photos, Yahoo! Maps, and so many of the location-based services that Yahoo! has offered.
Yahoo! is now offering a developer preview of this Yahoo! Internet Location Platform.
Here’s an example of the new platform in action. Check out this photo on Flickr. This photo was geo-tagged by the user, and since it was placed on a map, we were able to give it a set of these location tags. If you browse in to the tagged metadata using the Flickr API, you’ll notice a set of geo-tags called WOEID (Where On Earth IDs) which are permanent, unambiguous, language neutral tags that represent that location.
Since we have content with a tag, we can find out some interesting things, tag 727232 for example, is Amsterdam, and we can use the new APIs that we’re releasing to find out all sorts of relevant relationship information, including:
(Note: The links above are in XML, and may not be viewable in all browsers.)
This service allows you to discover location relationships from free-text place names, tag your content with location IDs for easy indexing, disambiguate numerous objects tagged with the same location, and so on.
Go ahead and check out the documentation on the Yahoo! Developer Network at http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/.
Congrats to the Yahoo! Geo team on this preview.
Michael Lawless
Sr. Product Manager, Yahoo! Maps
P.S. For more on subject, check out the post by Dan Catt on geobloggers.com.
Back in April, I gave a five-minute talk to a barful of Web 2.0 conference attendees in San Francisco. An audience member recorded me, and posted it to YouTube:
The event was Ignite at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo last month. This was the most recent in a series of slideshow “slams” that Brady Forrest has been putting on all around the country, and the second one held at Jamie Zawinski’s DNA Lounge in San Francisco (the first was last fall).
The format is inspired by pecha kucha. Each speaker is limited to 20 slides and five minutes. The slides advance automatically each 15 seconds. Each speaker is encouraged to tell a roomful of geeks how to do something.
The tight strictures of the format force the speaker to get to the point right away and pack as much information as possible into the allotted time. I’ll be honest: it was a bit intimidating.
The format itself turned out to be exhilarating, bringing out great performances from a number of the speakers, notably Kathy Sierra (how to make your users kick ass), Annalee Newitz (why giant monsters rule), and Lane Becker (the gruesome physical consequences of running a marathon).
I discussed some of the social design patterns (and antipatterns) that I’ve been gathering as curator of the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. You can hear the whole talk, including facetious arena-rock shout-out at the beginning, synched up with the slides (which are harder to read in the video), by watching this slidecast:
Christian Crumlish
Pattern Detective
Web 2.0 is all about collaboration, distribution and personal configuration and probably one of the biggest traffic drivers of social networks like Facebook or MySpace are videos and photos being sent to and from your contacts.
The problem for developers of networks is that you don't want people to leave your application to see a photo or a video, which means that you need a way to only get the media and embed that. Normally this happens using the media provider's API or - if they don't offer one - screen scraping (loading the whole document and programatically finding and extracting the media).
oEmbed is a great idea to work around that issue:
oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites. The simple API allows a website to display embedded content (such as photos or videos) when a user posts a link to that resource, without having to parse the resource directly.
Flickr, Viddler, Qik, Pownce and Revision3 are the first services to support oEmbed which means you can easily access photos and videos with a simple URL.
Say for example find a nice photo on flickr:
Original URL:
oEmbed URL:
Result:
<oembed>
<version>1.0</version>
<type>photo</type>
<title>? too much myspace error</title>
<author_name>codepo8</author_name>
<author_url>http://www.flickr.com/photos/codepo8/</author_url>
<cache_age>3600</cache_age>
<provider_name>Flickr</provider_name>
<provider_url>http://www.flickr.com/</provider_url>
<width>500</width>
<height>375</height>
<url>
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3128/2475016321_982666ec95.jpg
</url>
</oembed>
You can define the output format and the maximum width and height with URL parameters:
oEmbed URL:
Result:
{
version: '1.0',
type: 'photo',
title: '? too much myspace error',
author_name: 'codepo8',
author_url: 'http://www.flickr.com/photos/codepo8/',
cache_age: '3600',
provider_name: 'Flickr',
provider_url: 'http://www.flickr.com/',
width: '100',
height: '75',
url: 'http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3128/2475016321_982666ec95_t.jpg'
}
Supported formats for responses so far are photo, video, link and rich.
Christian Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network
A few weeks ago, we announced SearchMonkey, an new open platform that lets developers and site owners use semantic markup and structured data to enhance Yahoo! Search results and make them more useful, relevant, and visually appealing.
We wanted to remind you that we're kicking off this launch in true SearchMonkey style with a Developer Launch Party next Thursday, May 15. Come get the inside scoop on SearchMonkey, meet with our product managers and engineers over tasty (read: free!) food and beer, see live demos, and take a closer look at the Developer Tool.
When: May 15, 2008, 5:30 -- 8:30 p.m.
Where: Yahoo! Headquarters @ URL's Cafe
701 First Ave.
Sunnyvale, CA 94089
RSVP: Email your full name and company name directly
to searchmonkeyevent@yahoo-inc.com. Space is limited.
For more information on the agenda and logistics, check out the event page.
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