Yahoo! SearchMonkey

Last updated
Yahoo! SearchMonkey
Logo SearchMonkeyHiRes.png
Type of site
semantic search
Available in English
Owner Yahoo!
Commercialyes
Registrationno
LaunchedMay 2008
Current statusOffline

Yahoo! SearchMonkey (often misspelled Search Monkey) was a Yahoo! service which allowed developers and site owners to use structured data to make Yahoo! Search results more useful and visually appealing, and drive more relevant traffic to their sites. The service was shut down in October 2010 along with other Yahoo! services as part of the Microsoft and Yahoo! search deal. The name SearchMonkey is an homage to Greasemonkey. Officially the product name has no space and two capital letters.

Contents

Yahoo! SearchMonkey was selected as one of the top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008. [1]

Default apps

SearchMonkey had many default "apps" enabled; some were site-specific while others were object-based.

Examples

Creating apps

Apps were made through the SearchMonkey Developer Tool. Two types of apps were possible, ones that overwrote the result (Result Apps) and others that displayed below a result (Infobars). App creation was split into two parts, data and presentation.

Data

The data for an app could be either cached or run-time. Run-time data was limited to infobars, as an external fetch would take too long for the search page to render. Pages could be scraped using XSLT or via a web services call. Any webservice could be queried using a URL Template combined with any cached data. Webservices could be chained to query multiple sources and aggregate them onto the search page. Cached data could come from a variety of sources using standard markup and vocabularies.

Any data placed on a webpage in these formats would be picked up by Yahoo!'s crawlers and made available to app writers. This data was also available through Yahoo! BOSS (YQL wrapped query or documentation).

One could use the Structured Data Display app to see all the structured data with search results.

Presentation

The data was transformed into the display template using PHP hosted on Yahoo! servers. It was a simplified stripped down version of the language.

End of Life

In 2010, Yahoo shutdown SearchMonkey in favor of Microsoft's Bing search engine. [2]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Search</span> Search engine from Google

Google Search is a search engine provided and operated by Google. Handling more than 3.5 billion searches per day, it has a 92% share of the global search engine market. It is the most-visited website in the world. Additionally, it is the most searched and used search engine in the entire world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microsoft Access</span> Database manager part of the Microsoft Office package

Microsoft Access is a database management system (DBMS) from Microsoft that combines the relational Access Database Engine (ACE) with a graphical user interface and software-development tools. It is a member of the Microsoft 365 suite of applications, included in the Professional and higher editions or sold separately.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adobe ColdFusion</span> Rapid Web app development platform

Adobe ColdFusion is a commercial rapid web-application development computing platform created by J. J. Allaire in 1995. ColdFusion was originally designed to make it easier to connect simple HTML pages to a database. By version 2 (1996) it had become a full platform that included an IDE in addition to a full scripting language.

Yahoo! Search is a Yahoo! internet search provider that uses Microsoft's Bing search engine to power results, since 2009, apart from four years with Google from 2015 until the end of 2018.

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is a free and open-source graphical subsystem originally developed by Microsoft for rendering user interfaces in Windows-based applications. WPF, previously known as "Avalon", was initially released as part of .NET Framework 3.0 in 2006. WPF uses DirectX and attempts to provide a consistent programming model for building applications. It separates the user interface from business logic, and resembles similar XML-oriented object models, such as those implemented in XUL and SVG.

In computing, a virtual folder generally denotes an organizing principle for files that is not dependent on location in a hierarchical directory tree. Instead, it consists of software that coalesces results from a data store, which may be a database or a custom index, and presents them visually in the format in which folder views are presented. A virtual folder can be thought of as a view that lists all files tagged with a certain tag, and thus a simulation of a folder whose dynamic contents can be assembled on the fly, when requested. It is related in concept to several other topics in computer science, with names including saved search, saved query, and filtering.

Tableless web design is a web design method that avoids the use of HTML tables for page layout control purposes. Instead of HTML tables, style sheet languages such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are used to arrange elements and text on a web page.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Semantic MediaWiki</span> Software for creating, managing and sharing structured data in MediaWiki

Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) is an extension to MediaWiki that allows for annotating semantic data within wiki pages, thus turning a wiki that incorporates the extension into a semantic wiki. Data that has been encoded can be used in semantic searches, used for aggregation of pages, displayed in formats like maps, calendars and graphs, and exported to the outside world via formats like RDF and CSV.

Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) are the pages displayed by search engines in response to a query by a user. The main component of the SERP is the listing of results that are returned by the search engine in response to a keyword query.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microsoft InfoPath</span> Microsoft Office suite application to design rich XML-based forms

Microsoft InfoPath is a software application for designing, distributing, filling and submitting electronic forms containing structured data. Microsoft initially released InfoPath as part of the Microsoft Office 2003 family. The product features a WYSIWYG form designer in which the various controls are bound to data, represented separately as a hierarchical tree view of folders and data fields.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ovi (Nokia)</span> Former Internet services by Nokia

Ovi by Nokia was the brand for Nokia's Internet services. The Ovi services could be used from a mobile device, computer or via the web. Nokia focused on five key service areas: Games, Maps, Media, Messaging and Music. Nokia's aim with Ovi was to include third party developers, such as operators and third-party services like Yahoo's Flickr photo site. With the announcement of Ovi Maps Player API, Nokia started to evolve their services into a platform, enabling third parties to make use of Nokia's Ovi services.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SharePoint</span> Web application platform

SharePoint is a web-based collaborative platform that integrates natively with Microsoft 365. Launched in 2001, SharePoint is primarily sold as a document management and storage system. However the product is highly configurable, and its usage varies substantially among organizations, mostly spacing from sharing information through intranets to internal apps implementing business processes through workflows.

Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database management system developed by Microsoft. As a database server, it is a software product with the primary function of storing and retrieving data as requested by other software applications—which may run either on the same computer or on another computer across a network. Microsoft markets at least a dozen different editions of Microsoft SQL Server, aimed at different audiences and for workloads ranging from small single-machine applications to large Internet-facing applications with many concurrent users.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Windows Search</span> Desktop search platform by Microsoft

Windows Search is a content index desktop search platform by Microsoft introduced in Windows Vista as a replacement for both the previous Indexing Service of Windows 2000 and the optional MSN Desktop Search for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, designed to facilitate local and remote queries for files and non-file items in compatible applications including Windows Explorer. It was developed after the postponement of WinFS and introduced to Windows constituents originally touted as benefits of that platform.

Yahoo Search BOSS was a Yahoo! Developer Network initiative to provide an open search web services platform.

WolframAlpha is an answer engine developed by Wolfram Research. It answers factual queries by computing answers from externally sourced data.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microsoft Translator</span> Machine translation cloud service by Microsoft

Microsoft Translator is a multilingual machine translation cloud service provided by Microsoft. Microsoft Translator is a part of Microsoft Cognitive Services and integrated across multiple consumer, developer, and enterprise products; including Bing, Microsoft Office, SharePoint, Microsoft Edge, Microsoft Lync, Yammer, Skype Translator, Visual Studio, and Microsoft Translator apps for Windows, Windows Phone, iPhone and Apple Watch, and Android phone and Android Wear.

Effi is C++ application development framework.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Progressive web app</span> Specific form of single page web application

A progressive web application (PWA), or progressive web app, is a type of application software delivered through the web, built using common web technologies including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and WebAssembly. It is intended to work on any platform with a standards-compliant browser, including desktop and mobile devices.

ASP.NET Web Forms is a web application framework and one of several programming models supported by the Microsoft ASP.NET technology. Web Forms applications can be written in any programming language which supports the Common Language Runtime, such as C# or Visual Basic. The main building blocks of Web Forms pages are server controls, which are reusable components responsible for rendering HTML markup and responding to events. A technique called view state is used to persist the state of server controls between normally stateless HTTP requests.

References

  1. ""Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008", ReadWriteWeb award" . Retrieved 30 March 2009.
  2. ""Search Monkey falls victim to Yahoo-Microsoft search deal", ComputerWorld award". 17 August 2010. Retrieved 10 February 2016.