Let SearchMonkey Feed Your Facebook Addiction
- Posted February 26th, 2009 at 8:00 am by Yahoo! Search
- Categories: SearchMonkey
Starting today, Facebook enhanced results will automatically appear in search results. This means users can add a friend, poke, send a message, and view a person’s friends from the deep links on the search results page. Facebook shared the structured data for this SearchMonkey app by adding semantic markup to their public profile pages.
Here’s an example of the Facebook enhanced result with Alex Moskalyuk, a key Facebook engineer on this project.
See the SearchMonkey app for Facebook in action yourself and try a search for your friends. Here at the Yahoo! Search Blog, we had fun checking out the Facebook profiles of marketing VP Raj Gossain and senior product marketing manager Graham Mudd.
We care about privacy as much as you do, so you’ll only see results for Facebook users who have enabled their profiles to be publicly searched and viewed. If you’re interested in “social-izing” your search results page further, check out other SearchMonkey apps for social networking sites such as StumbleUpon, Delicious, and MyBlogLog.
We hope the SearchMonkey app for Facebook and our other social apps make finding and connecting with friends on the Web easier than ever. Let us know what you think.
SearchMonkey Team
- 14 Comments
- Subscribe
Looks like Facebook has many duplicate content pages for its profile pages in your index. Each subdomain by language and locale generates a separate result page in Yahoo!’s index.
http://www.facebook.com/people
zh-tw.facebook.com/people
etc.
Is the Searchmonkey app for Facebook turned on by default for all Yahoo! Search users? I don’t remember adding it.
What would be even better is a “Call” button, connected to Skype. OK, I’m asking too much — but, hey, it would be cool anyway.
Very cool feature, much appreciated. I prefer FB to any other social site so this makes it that much easier to network.
Ryan
I don’t remember adding it.
Yes, just to clarify — as the first paragraph implies, the Facebook SearchMonkey app is default on for all users.
Niall — good point about the duplicate INTL content, particularly if you do searches of the form “site:facebook.com “. We need to look into this.
Bertil — interesting idea! There is a Skype Facebook app, but as far as I know, the Skype button doesn’t appear on the *public* Facebook profile page, which is what powers the SearchMonkey result. Facebook would have to think carefully about how such a feature would work in practice.
Evan Goer
Yahoo! SearchMonkey Team
I can see this evolving even further down the road to simply the user experience. This recent change will most likely get more people interacting.
In my latest tests, Yahoo Search Monkey appears to fail on picking hCard data if the indexed page contains multiple hCards. Is anyone else experiencing this? Is this currently documented anywhere? Can I document it somewhere? I’ve tested with http://identi.ca/csarven (Try grabbing vcard.2 fn or photo). Thanks.
I dont like facebook. So ı have no membership :)
I had a false alarm earlier and managed to get it working properly. The problem turned out to be microformats data (i.e., the “Input”) not always being available to result items. Hopefully, the Input data will be consistent in the future.
I can no longer see the Facebook “semantic” results. What happened? I’d like to see Facebook’s hCards :)
Search Monkey is great! Please sell it to Google!
“Search Monkey is great! Please sell it to Google!”
No – create a public standard with the other search engines, so that all search engines can implement it.
I cannot see my FaceBook profile on Yahoo! Search…
http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0geu4pywrBJ3ksA7EJXNyoA?p=Senthil+Murugappan&fr=
This article is spectacular. It’s not everyday that we notice such awesome details over a blog article, not to mention on the internet.