News About Our SearchMonkey Program

We’ve been very pleased with the benefits that the SearchMonkey Program has provided to Yahoo! Search users over the last two years and want to share our plans for SearchMonkey with respect to the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance.  Some of the amazing improvements that SearchMonkey has enabled over the past two years include:

• Enhancing results on over 60% of all Yahoo! Search Result Pages, with relevant images, links or other useful information about listings.
• Providing “object filters” for over 18% of Yahoo! Search results, including the ability to filter search results by your favorite Web sites.
• Jumpstarting Yahoo! Search initiatives to provide richer search experiences, including automatic rich results and richer object displays on Yahoo! Search.

In keeping these previous efforts to bring structure to the Web, our enhanced results program will continue as we transition organic search listings to Microsoft. As part of the enhanced results program, we will be adding new entities (including people, Q&A, and real estate) to power both additional enhanced results and object filters within Yahoo! Search.

All of the existing enhanced result templates will continue to be generated from websites’ page markup and structured data feeds, and Yahoo! will continue to show this structured data on the Yahoo! Search results page, along with Microsoft’s organic listings. Over time, some of this structured data processing will be supported natively by the Microsoft platform. Webmasters will continue to have the ability to affect the presentation of a search result through page markup on their site (microformats and RDFa).

As we look to the future of Yahoo! Search, we are focusing on new search-related offerings we believe will provide additional value for publishers and partners.  In order to align our resources on strategic priorities, we have decided to close the SearchMonkey developer tool, gallery, and app preferences on October 1, 2010.  As a result, third party custom result apps, infobar apps, and data services will no longer appear on Yahoo!’s search results.  For developers who wish to retain their code, please export it using your favorite copy/paste tool before then.

We know many people enjoyed being part of the SearchMonkey developer community, and we want to give a heartfelt “thank you” to all of the developers and webmasters who have participated over the last two years.  We look forward to continuing to work with developers to explore new and interesting ways to incorporate useful applications into the search experience.

Natasha Fattedad
Principal Product Manager, Yahoo! Search