Yahoo To Announce "Search Monkey" Enhanced, Annotated Results At SMX West from Search Engine Land explains it better than I can, so read it there. The Yahoo blog calls it the open approach to search.
What is it? Basically, it gives publishers a way to tell Yahoo how to enhance their search results for free in Yahoo. It is basically works on the user end like the Google Coop Subscribed links, where a user needs to opt in to see the enhanced results. But Yahoo told me, they differ in that the publisher doesn't give Yahoo a list of queries on what triggers the results, but instead, Yahoo will convert the results to an enhanced listing when it feels the user will benefit from it, as opposed to when the publisher feels the user would benefit from it. I believe that is the main distinction here and not necessarily what Danny said in his postscript (I can be wrong of course, but I think I am not - reminder to head over to SEL and postscript). :-)
What does it look like?
Before:
After:
How do I implement this for my site? You can't. At least not just yet. This is just an announcement that Yahoo will enable this feature in the future.
Okay, so when Yahoo does launch it, how do I implement it? I am told there is a simple to use feed of some sort. Honestly, they would not give me many details on it at this point. I have a feeling this part is currently being worked on and they can go several routes on the final implementation. But I hear there will be multiple methods to implement this.
How do users get this? They need to opt in via a "Add to Yahoo Search" button.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld where Brett Tabke says this is an "awesome development." I am not so sure.
