Searchmonkey News & Articles

Yahoo! turned on support for deep links and images from Wikipedia and a select few other modules. This lurch toward enhanced search results is part of Yahoo!’s effort to lead the search market and allow structured data from third parties using the SearchMonkey platform. What will this mean for your site? More work.

Social Media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here's the week's top stories, in scan-friendly format.

This week:

• Searchmonkey and the Future of Wikipedia
• Unwrapp-- Follow Web App Updates
• Retweetist = Digg for Twitter
• Networks Get Social Media-Savvy for Obama's Big Day
• Twitter Updates, Adds Suggestions

Searchmonkey and the Future of Wikipedia

Wikipedia celebrated its 8th birthday last week, and ReadWriteWeb took the opportunity to look at what new technologies are being brought to bear to keep the online encyclopedia top of the pile.

Perhaps the biggest deal of the lot is one which comes not from Wikipedia itself, but from Yahoo!. It's SearchMonkey Wikipedia application went live last week, and integrates Wikipedia articles with Yahoo! search results. SearchMonkey is a development platform built by Yahoo! which allows open access to search data, and enables developers to roll their own search applications (check out our previous coverage). You should see the results of this monster mashup in action right away in your Yahoo! SERPs : it's turned on as default for users of Yahoo! search.

Apart from the new Yahoo! integration, Wikipedia plans to vastly increase media storage space, and to build in-site integration with 3rd party media sites like Flickr. This new focus on multimedia archiving makes eminent sense for the organization. If it succeeds in becoming the, er, Wikipedia for video and other media apart from plain text, there's no telling what kind of traffic volume it can expect in the medium term. Expect the next donations drive to be aiming for a multiple of those of the past to pay for all the new servers needed.

 

Yahoo continues its foray in the world of openness with the release of Yahoo BOSS: Build Your Own Search Service. This is the second announcement — the first being Yahoo SearchMonkey — that is part of their new directive called Yahoo!Open Strategy, or Y!OS and a move they hope will take away a bit of Google’s strong-hold on the search market.

The open social party is apparently the place to be. Even old Microsoft just announced LiveMesh). Now Yahoo, who’s Flickr photo sharing site is the second most popular used API on the web, has rolled out a limited preview to the developer platform they announced in February called SearchMonkey.