News, Reviews and more from Australia's Macintosh Authority
News, Reviews and more from Australia's Macintosh Authority
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Yahoo is adding two features to its SearchMonkey development platform to help site owners enrich the results that their pages generate on Yahoo Search.
On Thursday, the company is announcing via a post on its Yahoo Search Blog that it will expand its tools for enhanced search results to items such as products, news and events. Yahoo is also announcing it will accept five types of feeds from Google Base, Google's online repository for user-generated structured data.
Going up against the much more successful Google, Yahoo is working to make the results from its search engine more useful to visitors and better channels for site owners that want to reach Internet users. In March, it announced a SearchMonkey tool that lets site owners add videos, documents or games to the Yahoo Search results for their pages. All they need to do is add a few lines of code to the page where the item is embedded.
SearchMonkey is now offering a mechanism for users to add a variety of information and images to news, local information, product, event and discussion pages. For example, a vendor could make prices, customer ratings, and a product image come up as part of the search result for the product's name. All it would take is a few lines of code, and the results would appear a few weeks later, after Yahoo has re-crawled the page.
Yahoo will continue to support standard data formats such as RDFa (Resource Description Framework) and microformats, and it will add support for NewsML (News Markup Language) There is no sign-up process, Yahoo said.
Yahoo also announced a new capability for site owners with Google Base feeds. Google’s online resource includes databases for several types of information, including events, cars for sale and jobs. Yahoo will accept five types of Google Base feeds: Event, Product, Review, Job and Personals.
Google Base users can submit their existing Google Base feeds to Yahoo Site Explorer to have those feeds represented in Yahoo Search. In addition, Yahoo Site Explorer will convert that feed to DataRSS XML so it can be stored within Yahoo and accessed by third-party search engine developers who use Yahoo’s BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service).
Microsoft said on Sunday that it has raised the possibility of a new deal with Yahoo, one that may involve buying a part of the company but not all of it. “Microsoft is considering and has raised with Yahoo an alternative that would involve a transaction with Yahoo but not an acquisition of all of Yahoo,” Microsoft said in a brief statement. The company did not elaborate on the proposal. It said it did not plan at this time to make a new bid to acquire all of Yahoo, but that it was continuing to explore its options to expand its online services and advertising businesses.
James Niccolai | May 20, 2008
Just hours after saying it had ended talks over a possible investment from Microsoft, Yahoo announced a deal with Google to run some of Google’s advertisements alongside Yahoo search results. The non-exclusive deal unites the online advertising businesses of Google and Yahoo and comes as a setback to Microsoft, which had been trying to acquire all or part of Yahoo to strengthen its own online business and compete better with Google.
Nancy Gohring and James Niccolai | Jun 16, 2008
Cuil, the latest search engine startup to come out swinging from its corner with the hope of knocking out Google, is instead taking a beating that could do it long-term damage as a credible contender. The company received broad media coverage on Monday, primarily because it has former Google engineers on its team and because of its claim to have the world’s largest search index, but Cuil is now facing an angry backlash. The site had performance and availability problems throughout launch day, and a growing chorus of search market observers has declared the engine’s results to its queries unimpressive.
Juan Carlos Perez | Jul 30, 2008
Google began running a live test last year that lets people re-rank and remove search engine results and comment on them , but remains undecided about rolling out the changes for everybody.
Juan Carlos Perez | Sep 12, 2008
As I type these words, I am waiting for Apple's Developer Connection web site to ease up sufficiently for me to download the long-awaited Software Developer Kit for the iPhone (and iPod touch, just by the by). In a way, I hate developer-oriented announcements — "here's a really cool thing we're working on, and it's available now, and hoi polloi can have it in about six months". Actually, it's the six months I hate.
