Yahoo! SearchMonkey Developer Challenge illustrates diversity

The whole Yahoo! open platform initiative continues to grow apace (and largely unchallenged by Google and Microsoft), with BOSS rolling out earlier this month, and back in the SearchMonkey space the Developer Challenge's winners have been announced.

According to UCLA student Marco Vitanza, who picks up the $10,000 Grand Prize for his Blogspot Infobar,

"SearchMonkey is a great first step towards the semantic web, creating the incentive for site owners to add semantic tags to their content while providing a richer, more useful search experience for users."

Marco is joined by four other winners, one each for 'Best Infobar' (from BooRah), 'Best Enhanced Result' (from Greg Schechter, for Xbox.com), 'Best Data Service' (from David Hinckley), and most 'Innovative Structured Data' (from StumbleUpon).

StumbleUpon's entry, for example, enriches results returned from Yahoo! Search, adding simple reviews and ratings from StumbleUpon to the Yahoo! page as illustrated by this screenshot from the Yahoo! Search Gallery listing for the entry.

Each entry takes a different path toward meshing data from diverse sources, yet each results in an end-user experience that is richer and more compelling than the vanilla search result from Yahoo! or either of their major competitors. With the arrival of BOSS, the 'limitation' of having this enriched interaction only available to those who happen to be on a Yahoo! Search web page diminishes, and opportunities for rich and innovative mashing and meshing of data in context and at the point of need draw ever closer.

Congratulations to this year's winners, and to all those who entered; I look forward to seeing what those who follow them are capable of, and await responses from Mountain View and Redmond with anticipation.