ReadWriteWeb

Next year, Yahoo will introduce new technology to augment their Yahoo Search results: abstracts of key information alongside URLs. Instead of just offering a list of links, Yahoo's search results will include machine-extracted information that is relevant to the URL returned. Sound familiar? The technology is very much like SearchMonkey, except for one thing: this time the technology is being built in-house and not by independent third-party developers.

Yahoo's SearchMonkey platform allows publishers to easily write applications that integrate structured data from their own sites into Yahoo's search results. Most of these applications still have to be turned on explicitly by the user, but Yahoo has also started to integrate some of them into its regular search results. Today, Yahoo turned on results from the Citysearch and Zagat SearchMonkey applications for all users.

Google has long been offering iPhone-optimized sites for most of its services, as well as a dedicated search application for the iPhone. Yahoo, however, had mostly been lagging behind with respect to dedicated iPhone offerings. Now, Yahoo has unveiled a dedicated iPhone version of its search service, which, among other things, integrates results from SearchMonkey modules and also does a good job at displaying Flickr photos or movie showtimes in the results.

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.

My first post for ReadWriteWeb (nearly a year ago) started with the premise that search was "game over", that Google had won and the only opportunity left was (re)search - i.e. what one does after the basic search. Unfortunately, none of the search start-ups since then has made a dent in Google's relentless march towards search market dominance. In this article, we outline 11 search trends that may change that.

Here are some of the highlights from the week's Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we analyzed Adobe's new Web Office suite, investigated a worrying exodus of sellers from eBay, looked some more at Yahoo's Search Monkey, and showed you 6 tools to save links with. On the trends side we explored the latest Web happenings in Asia, provided an overview of I.T. 2.0, analyzed the exploding popularity of online video, and checked out the readiness of banking customers to use Web gadgets.

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.

For a few years now people have been talking about semantic search. Any technology that stands a chance to dethrone Google is of great interest to all of us, particularly one that takes advantage of long-awaited and much-hyped semantic technologies. But no matter how much progress has been made, most of us are still underwhelmed by the results. In head-to-head comparisons with Google, the results have not come out much different. What are we doing wrong?

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.

Thomson Reuters' Calais, a semantic markup API that we first reviewed in February, has reached its 2.0 release. The latest version aims to fix one of the main issues with Calais -- that it was too focused on business. Because Calais has roots as Clearforest, the rules it applies while parsing text are biased toward the language of business, which meant that its utility was limited. Version 2.0 has added new semantic entity types in an effort to rectify that.

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.