SearchMonkey Keeps Getting Smarter: Now Embeds Videos, Games, and Documents
Yahoo today announced a new feature for SearchMonkey that makes it very easy for site owners to embed flash videos, games, and documents directly on the Yahoo Search results page. The first sites to make use of this new feature are Hulu, Metacafe, and YouTube. Whenever a video from these sites appears in your search results, you can now watch it immediately in an embedded player right on the search results page.
SearchMonkey supports a number of popular video players, including Hulu, YouTube, and MetaCafe, as well as documents from Scribd and Slideshare, and Playcrafter games. Embedding these documents in the search results is relatively easy, and Yahoo provides content owners with an extensive set of helpful documents to get them started. 
To embed a video, for example, a developer only needs to add two lines of code. Videos are already appearing in Yahoo's search results now, and documents and games will become available in the next month or so.
Google, of course, also shows thumbnails for YouTube clips in its search results, but clicking on these will take you to YouTube and won't open the video player right on the page.
Yahoo says that it wants to make it easier for developers to make use of SearchMonkey. SearchMonkey is an extremely powerful tool, but it can also be very hard to use for somebody who doesn't have the technical knowledge required to create a SearchMonkey app. Thanks to this new feature, even novice webmasters will now be able to embed some of the most popular forms of content on Yahoo's search results page.
As we have said before, Yahoo continues to develop new and innovative ways to enhance its search, but so far, this hasn't made too much of a dent in Google's market share. Breaking Google's momentum will be very hard for any player in the search engine market, but if anything, Yahoo is clearly showing that it is not willing to throw in the towel just yet.
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Kudos to Yahoo for continuing to innovate the search experience. Since this is U2 week, I can't resist adding that Google seems to have been "stuck in a moment" with their core search capabilities. Obviously a golden cow being well-milked, a safe strategy, but I wish Yahoo had enough clout to inspire more competitive innovation.
Do you have any idea when Hulu will available in Turkey? We are waiting.
Hi Scott,
Well, it's always nice if we end up spurring more innovation with the competition. ;) However, beyond the obvious (improving the presentation of video search results), I personally see this release as less about the competition and more of a teaching tool. Frederic did a great job of pointing this out above -- we're trying to demonstrate to webdevs that if you deploy a tiny amount of structured data, that this can enable concrete benefits.
Obviously the world is not limited to Flash video, documents, and games -- there's a vast universe of RDF and microformats out there to play with. Stay tuned.
Evan Goer
Yahoo! SearchMonkey Team
all in one search engine
Since this is U2 week, I can't resist adding that Google seems to have been "stuck in a moment" with their core search capabilities. Obviously a golden cow being well-milked, a safe strategy.
ÇORBA TARIFLERI
Thanks Youuu