First Looks: Yahoo! Search Monkey

So the other day I was invited to try out Yahoo! Search Monkey. If you haven’t heard yet, the Yahoo! Developers Team is looking to set Yahoo! at the cutting edge of the current level of Internet Development. They have released a preview (think private beta) testing of SearchMonkey which is the first step to making Yahoo! entirely Web 3.0 (buzzword: sharing social information across websites, using the internet as a development platform itself).

After logging in you are given three categories to get started with. Presentation Applications, Custom Data Services, and Data Feeds. The first is pretty much defining what you want th individual to see when they run a search using your application. You can pull from up to 10 URL’s after defining what information you are looking to grab. The second, Custom Data Services, is where you are able to construct your own search engine’ish data path. You can strip data from pages themselves (think wikipedia) or grab from an API (think facebook). The last is mainly used for grabbing from RSS feeds and the like.

More to come as I get developing. I will keep you up to date!