Key Milestones for SearchMonkey and BOSS

Since launching SearchMonkey last May and Yahoo! Search BOSS last July, we’ve reached some impressive milestones: BOSS is now serving 30 million queries a day, and SearchMonkey is celebrating its first anniversary with 70 million enhanced results viewed daily.

Along the way, we’ve made great headway in opening up Yahoo! Search by accelerating the adoption of structured data across the Web and empowering developers to innovate in search. Here’s a look at some of the important initiatives we’ve accomplished with SearchMonkey and BOSS.

With BOSS, we’ve made key updates including allowing developers to monetize through third-party platforms and enabling access to SearchMonkey structured data. The BOSS API is on track to hit 1 billion monthly queries in May, without even including the volume from traditional Yahoo Search syndication. This is more than three times the queries served just six months ago, and ranks ahead of the combined searches on Ask and Facebook, and just behind Microsoft¹.

With SearchMonkey, we’ve launched numerous valuable initiatives over the last year. We turned applications default-on for many sites to improve local , reference, and social searches. We also enabled publishers to more easily display enhanced results for video, games, and documents by adding a few lines of code. Additionally, as a part of our effort to promote a more meaningful understanding of the Web, we have continued to support semantic tech gatherings such as VoCamp.

SearchMonkey is currently live in 23 markets around the world, reaching some significant global milestones:
• 70 million enhanced SearchMonkey results are viewed by users every day.
• Site owners have seen a more than 15% increase in the click-through rates of their SearchMonkey search results when tested against non-SearchMonkey results.
• 200 people enter the developer tool and start creating an application each day.
• Over 15,000 developers have registered to build applications, with over 400 applications available for use in galleries.
• RDFa structured data driven by SearchMonkey has increased by 413% since October, 2008.

In the coming months with SearchMonkey, we will be driving efforts toward increasing structured data on the Web, more uses for existing structured data, and easier ways to display enhanced results for some data types. We’ll throw in a little fun, too, with some open customization of the Yahoo! Search results page. With BOSS, you can look forward to more specialized searches that will help consumers reach their content more easily than ever.

We want to extend our thanks to the developer communities within both SearchMonkey and BOSS and to partners including Facebook, Yelp, and LinkedIn, for joining us in our efforts to make search richer and more open, and for helping us reach these milestones. We’re pleased with what we’ve done in this past year. More importantly, we’re excited about and focused on where we’re taking you next.

Larry Cornett
Vice President, Consumer Products, Yahoo! Search

¹comScore qSearch April 2009. Queries delivered via the BOSS API and served by Yahoo! partners are not counted as Yahoo! Search queries by comScore or other metrics providers.