Yahoo! Displays Serious Intentions in the Race for a Semantic Web

Yahoo! announced that it would enable as default some SearchMonkey applications into its search results. Earlier this year the Sunnyvale company launched SearchMonkey, an open platform that enables web developers to enhance the Yahoo! Search experience for end-users by creating applications that use structured data to change the visual appearance of search results and modify them to be more relevant or attract more traffic to their own services.

Users could, until now, access the Search Gallery and enable the third-party applications they wanted, but the company decided to integrate the Yelp, LinkedIn and their own Yahoo! Local SearchMonkey applications for all users. These were some of the first-ever SearchMonkey apps and were chosen due to their good user metrics.

Amit Kumar, Director of Product Management at Yahoo! Search notes that these will not be the last applications to be integrated as defaults into Yahoo! Search and outlined the general guidelines such an application has to meet in order to be considered. "Before making an application "default on" we require a few things: access to the site's structured data through semantic markup or a data feed, a well-designed and broadly useful application and positive user metrics." Kumar said.

He also explained how user metrics are determined, "to understand how a SearchMonkey app affects user metrics, we generally expose a small percentage of our users to a default-on experience and measure if and how it changes their usage." This should encourage developers that want to benefit from serving enhanced search results to users to create their own SearchMonkey application and aim at the success Yelp and LinkedIn had with it.

Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director, should be happy because his vision for a Semantic Web is becoming a reality as developers will now have to take semantic web markup such as RDF or Microformats more seriously in order to meet Yahoo's requirements of access to their site's structured data.

Yahoo! is not the only one pushing for a semantic web, Google already indexing semantic markup too, but it certainly looks like it took the lead in this race.