Yahoo Inserts Facebook Profiles Into Search Results

Written by Frederic Lardinois / February 26, 2009 9:22 AM / 14 Comments

Google may be outperforming Yahoo Search in terms of market share, but with programs like Search Monkey and BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service), Yahoo is still trying to innovate in the search space. Today, Yahoo announced a new feature that integrates Yahoo Search with some of Facebook's core functions. Whenever you see a Facebook profile in your search results, you can now directly add somebody as a friend, send messages, see their friends, or poke them.

~~In order for this to work, you have to first activate the Facebook SearchMonkey app and be signed in to Facebook~~. Update: The SearchMonkey app is actually turned on by default for all Yahoo Search users now (but you can opt out at any time).

After that, whenever a Facebook profile appears in your search results, it will include this person's public profile picture, as well as an additional line with the basic Facebook commands (add friend, poke, send message, view friends). According to Yahoo, Facebook shared this structured data with the SearchMonkey app by adding semantic markup to its public profile pages.

Maybe more importantly, though, features like this show that there is still a lot of life left in Yahoo Search. As Marshall Kirkpatrick noted a few weeks ago, things may not be looking too rosy for Yahoo in business terms, but the company is at least trying out a lot of cool search-related technologies.

Comments

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This feature was already turned on for me by default (i could opt OUT from the search-monkey options). This auto opt-in was how I felt Yahoo! portrayed it in their blog post

Posted by: Kevin | February 26, 2009 10:40 AM

Kevin - you are correct. I just updated the post. The FB searchmonkey app is actually now turned on for all users by default.

Posted by: Frederic Lardinois | February 26, 2009 10:51 AM

Google may be outperforming Yahoo Search in terms of market share, but with programs like Search Monkey and BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service), Yahoo is still trying to innovate in the search space. Today, Yahoo announced a new feature that integrates Yahoo Search with some of Facebook's core functions. Whenever you see a Facebook profile in your search results, you can now directly add somebody as a friend, send messages, see their friends, or poke them.

Posted by: Adsense | February 26, 2009 2:59 PM

Thanks Frederic! We're really excited about where SearchMonkey is headed and we appreciate as always RWW's support for open standards.

Cheers,
Graham Mudd

Posted by: graham mudd | February 26, 2009 3:13 PM

Thanks for the great press RWW. Its always nice to see other people care as much about SearchMonkey as we do.

On a side note, if anyone that can ACTUALLY sing wants to redo the audio on the video, I'll send you the karaoke version of the song :)

Paul Tarjan
(|): Chief Technical Monkey :(|)

Posted by: Paul | February 26, 2009 4:22 PM

This was an interesting article on Yahoo's strategy utilizing Search Monkey and Boss. It's interesting and has a degree of interactivity between systems as demonstrated by the login choices given as options prior to logging in. When facebook connect was chosen it put the comment window here to be filled in, but additionally the line in the instructions about the option has strike through the text.
This is the actual text and strike through copied and pasted in for your viewing:
"In order for this to work, you have to first activate the Facebook SearchMonkey app and be signed in to Facebook."

The video was entertaining, but a little out of character for a media giant. Very Folksy though! :)

Posted by: James | February 26, 2009 6:44 PM

This is really interesting. Yahoo! is still trying new strategies to get into sub domains of search market.

I am yet to find facebook profile on yahoo search, but glue is already rocking!

Posted by: prem ypi | February 27, 2009 2:11 AM