Yahoo SearchMonkey has been advertised for a while and recently has been made public. For those who don't know about it, the idea is that you can enhance the appearance of listings in search results to include photo, links, and other useful stuff. Obviously it doesn't change where you rank in Yahoo's SERPs, but it can be used to make your listing stand out from the crowd.

Like Google's Subscribed Links, the enhanced listings are an opt-in extension to personalise your search. This means that your enhanced listing will only be displayed if the user has added your application to their profile. Of course, if you application is popular Yahoo may add it to their search gallery. The main difference is that Yahoo provides two ways to customise the search results and, in my opinion, much better tools for doing the job.

To create a SearchMonkey application, you first need to select an existing data source or create your own. Currently the only common data service is the Yahoo index (where you can select bits Yahoo know about a page), but it is easy to create your own.

Yahoo has developed a DataRSS feed format that you supply your data in, so one approach is to create a feed from your data natively in this format and register it in Site Explorer. As it is an XML feed, it would be pretty easy to create this from existing RSS/Atom feeds.

This may all seem rather complicated if you just want to try things out, but don't worry. SearchMonkey allows you to create a data service from any web page using a simple XSLT. This means that you can pick out individual sections of a page to populate into attributes of your data source.

Here is an example using the SEOmoz blog/YOUmoz pages:

The highlights in the example show how I am picking out the <h1> tag within a particular <div> in the page and assigning it to the property "dc:title". In the preview window at the bottom it shows you an example of the data based on some sample URLs that you previously set up. You should be able to see how I pick out other elements of the page to get information such as details about the author (name, member profile URL, and photo).

As long as you know your XPath, you can very quickly build up a data service from any page on the internet (as long as its format doesn't change!). Also, you can create multiple data services that you can mash up when presenting your enhanced search results and also reuse data sources in different applications.

Next step is to create the presentational aspect of your application. There are two types of presentation: an enhanced result (changes the presentation of the result) or an infobar (provides extra information under the result). The infobar is always shown collapsed under the listing, so it isn't immediately visible to the user but does much more flexibility in terms of how you present the information (essentially you can output HTML directly into the infobar). The enhanced result is much more restrictive but is displayed in place of the normal result.

Let's have a look at building a simple enhanced result using the SEOmoz data service built earlier:

The code here is PHP and essentially you are building up an array of data for the various parts of the listing (e.g., the title, the image, etc). In the example above I have highlighted how I have assigned the photo for the author to the image src attribute. The nice thing with this editor is that you get a list of all data service attributes on the right, and when you click on them it pastes in the appropriate PHP code into the editor.

So how does this look when I do a search on Yahoo? Here is an example:

As you can see, within only about 15 minutes I've enhanced the listings from the blog and YOUmoz to show the category, thumbs ratings, and profile information. If you'd like to add this to your Yahoo account then simply visit the SEOmoz Enhanced Listings page. This is a great little enhancement, especially when you are using the search on SEOmoz (which is powered by Yahoo).

I think this tech is cool enough to talk about in its own right, but here are some thoughts about what it means for SEO. Along with the usual benefits of widgets promoting your site, having control over the presentation of your listings can help them stand out from others, making them more likely to be clicked on. As stated before, you still need to get your user to add the application to their search.

It would be really cool if you could use meta tags in your pages, or Site Explorer, or some other mechanism to tell Yahoo that you have an enhanced listing and use that automatically for all listings from your site. If this were standardised then you could provide some form of meta information that would work across different search engines. Also, it would be great if site owners who use Yahoo for their site search could automatically show the enhanced listings in the results.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this slightly technical post, but if not I hope you at least liked the title!