Transform your search results
June 13th, 2008 by Ken BurbaryAround here we spend lots of our time thinking about new ways to make the user experience better. We constantly try out new gadgets and technologies. Some work well. Others fail to show any promise. More recently, we’ve been focused on making search results more useful and visually appealing to users, by leveraging Yahoo! SearchMonkey.
Yahoo! Search Monkey is one of the latest developments by Yahoo! to open up their search to external developers. This benefits end users in many ways because it allows site owners and developers to now provide a richer search experience. SearchMonkey results are richer because it allows site owners to customize the display of the results, and enhance them by injecting additional information stored within their site, documents or own API.
Here is a short example of what Last.fm has done with their SearchMonkey application:
Now let’s compare the enhanced search result above with the standard result you get today:
Yahoo! SearchMonkey clearly delivers a much better experience to end users. It displays information about artist, album and track pages in a useful extract of the biography, links to listen to the artist if they are available, tags, similar artists and a picture of the artist.
Ah, but what’s the Catch?
Enhanced search results are not turned on by default. Currently, users must browse the gallery of available SearchMonkey applications and “add” them to their Yahoo! profile. It’s difficult to imagine most users will take the time to seek out and install the applications like this for a better experience. Yahoo! is, and needs to continue, to do more work to increase user awareness of SearchMonkey apps and also make it easier to install the applications themselves. Only then will we see significant levels of SearchMonkey penetration. What do you think? Would you take the time to enhance your search experience? Do you see the value in SearchMonkey results? Let me know in the comments below.
FYI - Detailed instructions on how to use SearchMonkey can be found here in a step-by-step user guide (courtesy of @davidberkowitz).
Tags: search, searchmonkey, Yahoo
June 18th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
Hate to say this, but I prefer the “before”. I don’t want extraneous graphics when I search. To me, that was google’s smartest decision - to make the search page super clean and as fast loading as possible. What a thumbnail adds to the party escapes me.