Those of you that followed my "Trends and Truisms" series at the beginning of this year know that one of my major focuses was openness. I gave a lot of credit to Google and many others- but I did not give enough credit to Yahoo.
Yahoo has long been a proponent of open standards. Two years ago, before the openness rush of 2007 Yahoo Local adopted the open standard; microformats. Since that time, Yahoo has adopted other open standards such as Open ID. They also created their Mobile Developer Platform which they described as;
"...a one-stop solution for developers to create mobile-optimized applications that are easy to build, quick to deploy, and run across a wide selection of devices, thus making it much easier for Internet content and services to "go mobile." By providing developers with tools to write code once and efficiently publish their content instantly across hundreds of devices - accessible by hundreds of millions of users - Yahoo!'s Mobile Developer Platform is expected to usher in a dramatic acceleration in the adoption of mobile services by creating an explosion of new choices for the consumer."
So what is next for Yahoo Open (I made that name up, Yahoo if you are out there, feel free to use it :) ).
Open search!
Yahoo plans to unveil a project code named, "Search Monkey" and I for one am a huge fan of the idea! In certain ways this project is similar to Google Co-Op ( you can see this on the sidebar of this blog, it is the button that says, "Add My Expertise To Your Google Web Searches").
What Google Co-Op does is add a human filter to your searches. The human filter can be anyone who signs up for the Google Co-Op beta. They then s set certain parameters that act as the filter. The idea is, if you feel we have similar interests, and you trust the editorial twist I have placed on search results, you will find more relevant results. There is an element of this in what Yahoo is doing (in this sense that sites, blogger's and other content providers can annotate search results), but they are positioning the project in a way that is much more consumer facing, and a whole lot sexier.
This is the pic being used at TechCrunch and Search Engine Land to show SearchMonkey in action :
According to TechCrunch, Search Monkey will "consist of a set of APIs that allow third parties to modify search results on Yahoo by adding images, structured data and additional deep links".
This is a brilliant move on Yahoo's part (in my humble opinion). It has been increasingly tough for Yahoo to compete with Google in natural search market share, and while it is important for Yahoo to continue to improve upon it's algorithm in order to compete with the Big G, projects like this add to the variety of ways users can interface with the Yahoo search engine. This product also makes it attractive for content producers to add value to their own services (which inevitably results in a wider distribution of Yahoo products).
Yesterday I had a meeting with a new Mobile Startup called Buzzd. They are doing some really cool things with mobile discovery on the local level. By powering local WAP sites they are creating a local directory for events, parties, bars and many other things. One thing I did not talk about with the people from Buzzd is more general search (I have no idea what they have up their sleeves, we simply did not talk about it). In light of what I am reading about SearchMonkey, it seems like the perfect product for a company like Buzzd to partner up with.
The reason I am using Buzzd as an example is that I feel that SearchMonkey has huge potential for mobile providers, given that it allows content providers the ability to structure information that is suitable to power the search function of their mobile web property.
One thing that many have still not comes to terms with information architecture for small location based devices. I often talk about the fact that the mobile web is an extension of a the overarching web, but content needs to designed differently with different usability standards.
I am excited to see how Search Monkey is used, and whether or not it is as significant in the mobile space as I think.
Tags: buzzd, yahoo, search monkey, search, mobile, WAP