Yahoo Announces Facebook, SearchMonkey Features

Yahoo announced two new features for SearchMonkey and Facebook that will be of particular interest to site owners and administrators. Yahoo's Messenger Pingbox for Facebook is a widget that allows administrators and social-networking users to keep in touch with visitors to their site. A new SearchMonkey feature lets site owners enhance their search results with flash video, games and documents.

Yahoo announced two new features for SearchMonkey and Facebook.

The new updates to SearchMonkey allow a site designer with flash video, games, spreadsheets or presentations embedded on their page to add lines of code that will make their page appear as an enhanced result in Yahoo's search results.

In other words, if a site administrator wants to post a video of his corporation's CEO giving a briefing, the administrator can integrate two lines of code that will show the site as an enhanced result; when users click on the thumbnail image from the video beside the search result, they'll be able to watch the CEO briefing on the search results page.

Yahoo has opened up much of its search capability to developers lately.

On Feb. 11, the company rolled out a number of new developer innovations to the Yahoo Search BOSS API, allowing increased access to structured data and the ability to create longer abstracts.

The change allowed developers access, through the BOSS API, to the structured data that Yahoo SearchMonkey pulled from Web sites via Yahoo Web Crawler. SearchMonkey, a pillar of the Yahoo Open Strategy, was introduced in May 2008.

In another announcement, Yahoo has also begun offering its embeddable IM application for Web pages, Pingbox, for Facebook.

The customizable widget can be placed on one's Facebook profile, allowing visitors to the page to send instant messages without needing to sign into Yahoo Messenger.