SeoAlchemist

Today, at the inaugural Search Marketing Expo West conference, Yahoo plans to unveil a project code-named “Search Monkey,” a set of open-source tools that allow users and publishers to annotate and enhance search results associated with specific web sites.

The new enhancements differ from Yahoo’s “Shortcuts” that sometimes appear at the top of search result pages. Shortcuts are served by Yahoo whenever the search engine is confident that the shortcut links are more relevant than the other web search results on the page. Often, shortcuts highlight content from Yahoo’s own network of sites.

The new enhancements can be applied to any web site. Publishers can add additional information that will be displayed with the web search result. For example, retailers can include product information, restaurants can include links to menus, reviews, local merchants can display operating hours, address and phone information, and so on—far more information than a Title, URL and description that make up current generation search results.

“Traditionally, we talk about results and results only. The interesting thing we’re adding here is the ability to annotate someone’s results,” said Amit Kumar, product lead for the open search platform.

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