In lieu of doing a complete recap today, I wanted to share some great information about a brand new way Yahoo! has come up with to use its search engine, called SearchMonkey. Yahoo! had talked about this new way to show search results a couple months ago, but it was showcasing it today at the exhibition hall at the Web 2.0 Expo.
Basically, it takes Yahoo’s search engine and allows you to see into the data on the results link without having to click on the link:
Yahoo has combined “a free, open platform with structured, semantic content from across the Web.” SearchMonkey “gives all Web site owners an opportunity to present more useful information on the Yahoo! Search page as compared to what is presented on other search engines. Site owners will be able to provide all types of additional information about their site directly to Yahoo! Search. So instead of a simple title, abstract and URL, for the first time users will see rich results that incorporate the massive amount of data buried in websites — ratings and reviews, images, deep links, and all kinds of other useful data — directly on the Yahoo! Search results page.”
From a recruitment standpoint, this is an incredible timesaver for clicking through our results page! I asked them to do a sample search using LinkedIn, since LinkedIn had already provided some code for this demo. I know this photo isn’t the greatest quality, but this is what the results can look like. And if you know how to write code, you can actually write code tailored to what you want to see — so for example, using a site:linkedin.com search string, you could write code that would display the industry, title, location, etc. directly on the results page for individual LinkedIn profiles.
Keep in mind this is still in beta so some of the kinks are being worked out, but can you imagine the coolness of using site: searches and getting the information you need right on the results page, as opposed to having to click through every single result? Fantastic!