Taking charge of search

Posted June 6th, 2008 at 1:30 pm by Nicki Dugan, Blog Editor

 3 Comments / Filed in: Trends & News

Remember SearchMonkey, our new open initiative to let developers and site owners mashup helpful data with Yahoo! Search results? If you want to be among the first to experience these enhanced results, you need to check out the latest element in the SearchMonkey rollout: The Yahoo! Search Gallery. This beta feature lets you choose the content modules that will appear in your results. (Did I mention it’s in beta? We had a few bumps out of the gate but have since addressed them.)

Here’s how to personalize it: After logging in and conducting a search in any Yahoo! Search box, you’ll notice a “Customize” link to the right of the yellow “Search” box. Select “Browse Gallery” in the pull-down menu and you’ll be taken to a list that, at last count, includes nearly 40 different options for enhancing Yahoo! Search. For example, if you select “Yelp,” your search results will include things like a preview of photos, reviews, rating, address, and phone number. If you select “Epicurious,” your search for pumpkin pie will include links to specific recipes from the popular foodie site. By selecting “Facebook,” any time you search for a name, you’ll get a thumbnail of that person’s public Facebook profile right within your search results. Other great enhancement options include LinkedIn, Howstuffworks.com, MTV.com, WebMD, Amazon, and a host of Yahoo! properties like Finance, Real Estate, Health, Autos, Local and Shopping.

We’ve set a few initial defaults for you with Yahoo! Video, Flickr and Yahoo! Travel and we’ll add to that list once we see which applications are most useful and popular. For the time being, if you want to see SearchMonkey results when you search, you need to add Enhanced Results and Infobars from the Search Gallery.

And, of course, this is just the beginning. It’s only been two weeks since we unleashed developer creativity on all of the possibilities SearchMonkey has to offer. There are plenty more innovations to come and a bunch of applications in the works.

Check out our Search Blog for more skinny and go here if you’re a developer ready for some monkey business.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Tagged: open, searchmonkey

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3 Comments Add your own

Danny Howard | June 6th, 2008 at 2:45 pm

Wow. This looks cool. At first.

Until I try to add some services. I click on three then go to the next page. I wonder, “Is it really that AJAX?” I click “back” and see that nothing was added. So, I scroll through the page, clicking the options I want to add, but I don’t see an “add” button, just next page. So I scroll up to the top, click “add” then get a dialog screen, and then like a control panel saying that the things I thought I just added are “to be added” . . . and then assuming that this stuff is going to be added I’ll have to go “back” two-is-it-three screens to get to the next page of things I might want to add.

Or, I suppose, I could just use Google.

I think more folks will be excited about this new feature after you get the results back from the usability panel and tighten up the interface.

Cheers,
-danny

Sunil | June 10th, 2008 at 7:33 pm

Do I have to add these one by one? That’s painful. Is there an option to have all results customized? Also, I don’t want to keep coming back to this page when additional sites customize their results. Please make it simple if you want to succeed. It should be one click = customized results. This is overkill customization.

Paul Tarjan | June 16th, 2008 at 12:55 pm

Your voices have been heard! Check out the new UI for the gallery and see if you’re qualms have been washed away.