Yahoo SearchMonkey Marks First Anniversary

Yahoo marked the first anniversary of Search Monkey, its open developer platform for Yahoo Search, and a few milestones for Yahoo Build your Own Search Service, its open search Web services platform.

In a May 19 corporate blog posting, the company claims 70 million enhanced SearchMonkey results viewed daily, 15,000 developers registered for application-building, and a 413 percent increase in the RDFa structured data driven by SearchMonkey over the past eight months. BOSS is serving 30 million queries per day.

“We’ve made great headway in opening up [Yahoo] Search by accelerating the adoption of structured data across the Web and empowering developers to innovate in search,” Larry Cornett, vice president of consumer products for Yahoo Search, wrote in the blog posting.

“In the coming months with SearchMonkey, we will be driving efforts toward increasing structured data on the Web, more uses for existing structured data, and easier ways to display enhanced results for some data types,” Cornett wrote. “We’ll throw in a little fun, too, with some open customization of the [Yahoo] Search results page.”

BOSS will also offer more specialized searches.

Even as it makes its search capabilities more robust, Yahoo is busy streamlining other parts of its organization. In April 2009, the company announced that it would shut down GeoCities, the Web page creation service it purchased for $3.6 billion in 1999, later this year.

During Yahoo’s first-quarter 2009 earnings call on April 21, CEO Carol Bartz said the company would analyze and keep only those properties that represented true value.

“The best candidate for focused investment and renewed innovation are those products that generate the majority of our traffic and corresponding economic value,” Bartz said. “These include the homepage, sports, news, finance, entertainment, mail, search and mobile.”

At the time, Bartz also announced planned cuts of 5 percent of Yahoo’s global work force of 13,600 workers. Yahoo came in second in the U.S. core search market in April 2009, with 20.4 percent share, according to the research group ComScore. Rival Google came in first with 64.5 percent.