About five months ago Yahoo! enabled access to the SearchMonkey platform for general use.  In a press release, Yahoo! outlined the platform as being a free open-source solution, whereby website operators could individually define and control the content and display of their own search results. Using this they can integrate photos, information snippets and links into algorithmic search results. Yahoo! calls this method of editing results ‘Structured Data’ and hopes that searchers will rapidly augment the results generated.  Typical results  will hopefully display the most important information such as price details, ratings or contact addresses at first glance, without needing further clicks.

The SearchMonkey applications are available to searchers in the Yahoo! Gallery (among other locations) in various thematic areas, such as “local”. Here, logged-in users can activate modules of choice referring to their search needs, or deactivate others which are not appropriate.

From time to time Yahoo! introduces proven applications directly into their web search, thus automatically making them available (and visible) to all users. Recently, the US-edition of Yahoo! Search added applications such as CitySearch (local search and rating platform) and Zagat (restaurant and hotel guide) to their existing Yelp and Yahoo! Local search modules. (This was mentioned by the SearchMonkey team in the Yahoo! Search Blog). Through this innovation, searches for local companies are speeded up on Yahoo! Search, and more immediately accessible. So during a local search for restaurants, an application like CitySearch can deliver ratings, opening times, addresses and phone numbers, directly displayed on the search results page.  And links to each restaurant profile, user feedback and to a map view are also generated. The user is here able to find much more information than usually delivered by a ’standard’ search.

In the German edition of Yahoo! Search, users are still required to personally choose whether local search results are to be integrated in the search results.  In the Search Gallery [de=Such Galerie], various SearchMonkey modules can be selected, including Qype, meinestadt.de or dialo.de.