I’ve been meaning to get to grips with Yahoo’s Search Monkey technology for a while but put it off because the documentation wasn’t great for beginners. Then I discovered this excellent resource on a Google Code wiki and had a few hours spare, so I got stuck in.

The result is a Search Monkey application that enhances the Yahoo search results with a Twitter user’s profile information when their profile appears as a result of your search:

What Is Yahoo Search Monkey?

Search Monkey is Yahoo’s technology that allows developers and website owners to add widgets to a set of search results. Yahoo have really stolen a march on Google with this enhancement and hopefully, their open, developer-oriented approach will give them a competitive edge over the Big G.

Developers cannot force their Search Monkey applications on users, instead a user chooses to enhance his/her results by choosing applications from a gallery of available enhancements or by going to the application’s homepage. If the user is logged in Yahoo, they can click the add button to enhance their Yahoo SERPs:

SEO Aside: User choice in the enhanced SERPs is a pretty powerful differentiation from Google’s offering. A heavy social media user would choose an entirely different set of enhancements to an online shopper.

Building A Search Monkey App

There are two aspects to every Search Monkey app - the data and the presentation.

The data aspect provides the extra information that is used to enhance the SERPs. This can be gleaned by scraping the page or through a third-party API. For my application, I chose to scrape the Twitter profile page for the user’s:

• Display name
• Avatar
• Follower count
• Following count

Yahoo’s page scraping is pretty sweet - the page gets put through HTML Tidy to fix any validation issues and then it runs an XSL Transform to grab the data you want.

XSLT is not the easiest technology to understand, but most pages can be scraped with very simple transforms. One aspect that threw me at first, is that HTML Tidy makes all element tags uppercase, so make sure your XSLT uses capitals in the XPath declarations.

Want To Try It Out?

Trying out my application is easy, just follow these instructions:

1. Log in to your Yahoo account (or sign up if you don’t have one yet)
2. Head over to the application’s homepage, by clicking this link
3. Click the “Add” to add the app to your search results
4. Test it out by searching Yahoo for a Twitter username and look for the little bird icon below the Twitter profile page in the search results
5. Click the down arrow to show extra information

I hope you like it. Let me know what you think by leaving a comment below, or if you have an idea for a Search Monkey application, leave a comment and maybe I’ll code it up for you.