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Yahoo 'Next Generation of Search'

Today, Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) plans to formally open its search platform to the developer community, inviting site owners and third-party programmers to begin creating applications that will enhance the content that appears in a search listing.

Through the SearchMonkey initiative, Yahoo plans to tap into the vast stores of structured data within the Web pages its search engine indexes to deliver results that provide much more information about sites' content than the traditional list of blue links with text snippets underneath.

The announcement comes on the same day that Yahoo's future is once again called into question. Earlier today, activist investor Carl Icahn confirmed his intention to replace Yahoo's board of directors in an effort to consummate the sale of the company to Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT).

Throughout the three dramatic months of resisting against Microsoft's bid, Yahoo came forward with a series of announcements of new products, partnerships and developer initiatives. Today's opening of the developer platform, after three weeks of a very limited preview, is the company's first major announcement since Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) pulled its acquisition bid off the table.

Amit Kumar, Yahoo's director of product management for search, said that SearchMonkey is at the center of the Yahoo Life initiative, where the portal is opening its doors to the developer community to recast itself as the crossroads of the social Web.

"Search engines so far haven't taken full advantage of the fact that there's all this structured data," Kumar told InternetNews.com. "This is the beginning of the next generation of search."

Among the major search engines, Yahoo is not alone in updating the results pages to incorporate data of multiple formats. Through Google's (NASDAQ: GOOG) universal search initiative, for instance, images, videos and other types of content are returned with regular Web pages in search results. A search for a place of interest through Google, Yahoo or MSN will often produce information such as an address, picture or map. ...

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Source: internetnews.com