When Yahoo announced Search Monkey, its developer platform for search, it also announced the SearchMonkey Developer Challenge, which was going to reward the best search extensions based on SearchMonkey. Today, Yahoo announced the winners: StumbleUpon, BooRah, computer scientist Greg Schechter, and David Hickley from GEDview.com. The grand prize of $10,000 went to Marco Vitanza, for his Blogspot Infobar.
Hitwise Intelligence took an interesting look at the breakdown of Yahoo's properties today. They come to the conclusion that, even if Yahoo sells off its search division, Yahoo's other properties probably wouldn't be too affected by this, as they get most of their traffic from Google's search anyway. Only Yahoo Image Search, Games, Maps, and News get most of their traffic from Yahoo Search.
Update: Yahoo! and Google have indeed announced a partnership in the form of a non-exclusive deal allowing Yahoo! to run Google advertising alongside search results. The press release is here.
The clumsy $44 billion mating dance that began in February between Microsoft and Yahoo! officially came to an end today. Yahoo! and Microsoft each issued statements saying that talks had been concluded, though Microsoft left the door open for non-outright-acquisition partnerships. Meanwhile, multiple sources are reporting that Yahoo! and Google are set to announce some sort of search deal, perhaps as early as today. So what's next for both companies?
Yahoo!'s SearchMonkey platform got a little more public today with the unveiling of the Search Gallery -- the platform's official application repository. The gallery has already been open to developers and curious bloggers for a couple of weeks, but Yahoo! is now pushing it to the public at large via a "Customize" drop down menu on all search results. In addition, starting today developers can share applications via external links even if they haven't yet been approved for inclusion in the official gallery.
Yahoo! today becomes the latest web BigCo to offer an API allowing developers to gain access to users' address books. Though the Address Book API was publicly launched today, it has already been in use at a handful of large partner sites, including LinkedIn and Plaxo. Charles Wu, the product manager for the Address Book platform, offered a number of use cases for the new API on the YDN blog this morning.
Last week at the SemTech 2008 Conference that took place in San Jose, Yahoo! Researcher Peter Mika spoke in detail about the company's new SearchMonkey search platform initiative. Mika talked broadly about his work looking at metadata on the web, and how that led to the birth of SearchMonkey. This post is based on notes from that talk.
Yesterday, Microsoft issued a statement to publicly acknowledge that they hadn't lost interest in Yahoo!. Instead of a hostile takeover, Microsoft may be going after Yahoo from an entirely different angle and the industry is buzzing with exactly what angle Microsoft intends to pursue. Here's a look at the statements by Microsoft and Yahoo, and what industry leaders have to say.
Paul Miller reports that Yahoo! is today opening up its open developer platform for search SearchMonkey. SearchMonkey, which we reported on at the Web 2.0 Expo, is a component of a major overhaul at Yahoo! across all of its properties to "rewire" for the social graph and data portability. SearchMonkey allows developers to build applications for Yahoo! search "that enhance the usefulness and relevance of search results," according to Amit Kumar, Product Manager for Yahoo! Search.
Yahoo! Buzz, Yahoo!'s Digg-killer social news site, has updated to add widgets, new RSS feeds, and an indicator of who first buzzed a story. Buzz, which is currently in beta, has also recently added a new round of publishers (including ReadWriteWeb) and says it has sent out over 50 million referrals since opening in February.
Last week, Yahoo! purchased enterprise-level web analytics service provider IndexTools. Yesterday, Dennis Mortensen, COO of Index Tools, announced on his blog that Yahoo! would be setting the service free. The decision to offer a free analytics suite follows similar moves by Google and Microsoft. Google released Analytics (which we use here on ReadWriteWeb) in November 2005, drawing on software it acquired from Urchin and Adaptive Path, and Microsoft's adCenter Analytics is based on Deep Matrix, which it acquired in 2006.
