X
Business

Yahoo! gets local with SearchMonkey

Continuing to deliver on their aim of enriching the core search offering with a little help from SearchMonkey, Yahoo! yesterday announced that the existing SearchMonkey apps for CitySearch and Zagat are now available by default to all users of Yahoo!
Written by Paul Miller, Contributor

Continuing to deliver on their aim of enriching the core search offering with a little help from SearchMonkey, Yahoo! yesterday announced that the existing SearchMonkey apps for CitySearch and Zagat are now available by default to all users of Yahoo! Search.

Launched back in May, SearchMonkey offers developers the tools and capabilities to surface their data within Yahoo! Search results, improving the utility of a Yahoo! Search and driving more traffic to the sites providing the data in the first place. Most of these tools end up in the Yahoo! Search Gallery, where individual searchers can opt to add their capabilities to the search results they see. From time to time, as yesterday, Yahoo! raises the visibility of tried and tested tools and makes their capabilities available as part of the default Search offering.

Review-type sites appear to work particularly well, with searchers on Yahoo! increasingly rewarded with a growing number of enriched results to their queries. Rather than just seeing, for example, that Citysearch has information on a restaurant of interest, searchers can now see images, basic category, location and opening information, and a star rating for the location; all within the Yahoo! Search page itself.

Over on ReadWriteWeb, Frederic speculates that these enrichments may be leading to a slight rise in market share for Yahoo! Search. It's clearly hard to know, one way or the other, at this stage but I imagine that it's a trend being watched very closely by the SearchMonkey team.

Editorial standards