Yahoo! SearchMonkey eases publication of product data

Read on Yahoo! Search blog:

Back in March 2009, we announced a simple way for site owners to embed video, games, and documents in Yahoo! Search results. Starting today, we are expanding this capability by giving site owners the power to display enhanced results for product pages, local information, events, news, and discussions.

If your site’s data falls into one of these categories, add a few lines of markup to your pages, and SearchMonkey will do the rest of the work. After we recrawl your page, we’ll extract the structured data and use it to display your data as an enhanced result.

For example, a retail website could add a few lines of code so that its product pages display as an enhanced result that includes the overall rating, price, reviews, and product photo directly on the search results page. Let’s say we have a fictional store called Sytore.com and the site owners have added the following code to their product pages:

<div typeof=”product:Product”
xmlns:product=”http://search.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/product/”
xmlns:rdfs=”http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#”>

<span property=”product:listPrice”>49.99</span>
<span property=”product:salePrice”>39.99</span>
<span property=”product:currency” content=”USD” />

<span property=”rdfs:label”>Pinball Maven : Video Games : Electronics</span>

<span rel=”rdfs:seeAlso media:image”>
<img src=”http://www.sytore.com/product.jpg”/>
</span>

<div rel=”review:hasReview”>
<span typeof=”review:Review”>
<span property=”review:rating”>4</span>
<span property=”review:totalRatings”>17</span>
</span>
</div>
</div>

Sytore.com’s product pages (such as its product page for “Pinball Maven”) would then display as an enhanced result:

The SearchMonkey documentation for developer has been extended and now described this new RDFa syntax for products.

When launched in May 2008, SearchMonkey was a really innovative approach to search. Unfortunately, this innovation – along with a few other ones – has not stopped the slow decline of the Yahoo! Search market share. Still, going semantic remains a key idea to improve the web search experience. Google showed it was also interesting in this area by announcing “Rich Snippets” a few months ago.

While both giants rely on RDFa syntax to describe products (Google also supports hProduct microformat), they use custom syntaxes; that means a developer that wants to publish structured content to both search engines need to support the two syntaxes. Not really convenient. The risk for Yahoo! is clearly that most publishers will start noticing the benefits of semantic web and RDFa when Google deploys “Rich Snippets”, and will implement the Google syntax rather than the Yahoo! one…

To know more about RDFa:

• AListApart has published an “Introduction to RDFa“
• A really interesting article that compares RDFa and microformats.