Yahoo! SearchMonkey
Encyclopedia
Yahoo! SearchMonkey was a Yahoo!
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
. 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.
. Others are object-based
.
using XSLT
or web services may be called. Any webservice may be queried using a URL Template
combined with any cached data. Webservices may be chained to query multiple sources and aggregated them onto the search page. Cached data may come from a variety of sources using standard markup and vocabularies.
Any data placed on a webpage in these formats will be picked up by Yahoo!'s crawlers and made available to app writers. This data is also available through Yahoo! BOSS (YQL wrapped query or documentation).
You can use the Structured Data Display app to see all the structured data right in your search results.
hosted on Yahoo! servers. It is a simplified stripped down version of the language.
Yahoo!
Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...
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
Greasemonkey is a Mozilla Firefox extension that allows users to install scripts that make on-the-fly changes to HTML web page content on the DOMContentLoaded event, which happens immediately after it is loaded in the browser .As Greasemonkey scripts are persistent, the changes made to the web...
. 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
Currently, there are many default "apps" turned on. Some are site-specificSite-specific
Site-specific is used in a range of contexts:In art Site-specific artIn molecular biology Site-specific recombination...
. Others are object-based
Object-based
In general, object-based indicates that something such as a theory, language, or model is based on the concept of object.In computer science, the term object-based has two different senses:...
.
Examples
- Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog on Amazon
- Inline Rick Rolls
- Thai food on yelp
- SearchMonkey on wikipedia
- Person search
Creating Apps
Apps are made through the SearchMonkey Developer Tool. Two types of apps are possible, ones that overwrite the result (Result Apps) and ones the display below a result (Infobars). App creation is split into two parts, data and presentation.Data
The data for an app may be either cached or run-time. Run-time data is limited to infobars, as an external fetch will take too long for the search page to render. Pages can be ScrapedWeb scraping
Web scraping is a computer software technique of extracting information from websites...
using XSLT
XSLT
XSLT is a declarative, XML-based language used for the transformation of XML documents. The original document is not changed; rather, a new document is created based on the content of an existing one. The new document may be serialized by the processor in standard XML syntax or in another format,...
or web services may be called. Any webservice may be queried using a URL Template
URL Template
A URL Template is a way to specify a URL that includes parameters that must be substituted before the URL is resolved. The syntax is usually to enclose the parameter in Braces...
combined with any cached data. Webservices may be chained to query multiple sources and aggregated them onto the search page. Cached data may come from a variety of sources using standard markup and vocabularies.
- MicroformatsMicroformatsA microformat is a web-based approach to semantic markup which seeks to re-use existing HTML/XHTML tags to convey metadata and other attributes in web pages and other contexts that support HTML, such as RSS...
- RDFaRDFaRDFa is a W3C Recommendation that adds a set of attribute-level extensions to XHTML for embedding rich metadata within Web documents...
- eRDFEmbedded RDFEmbedded RDF is a syntax for writing HTML in such a way that the information in the HTML document can be extracted into Resource Description Framework...
- SearchMonkey Feeds
Any data placed on a webpage in these formats will be picked up by Yahoo!'s crawlers and made available to app writers. This data is also available through Yahoo! BOSS (YQL wrapped query or documentation).
You can use the Structured Data Display app to see all the structured data right in your search results.
Presentation
The data is transformed into the display template using PHPPHP
PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...
hosted on Yahoo! servers. It is a simplified stripped down version of the language.