Table of Contents
Welcome to the SearchMonkey Guide. Using SearchMonkey, developers and content owners can use structured data to make Yahoo! Search results more useful and visually appealing, and drive more relevant traffic to their sites.
How does it work? The SearchMonkey developer tool helps you find existing data services, construct your own data services, and determine how to display this additional data in search results. Once you’ve built your application, you can use it yourself, share it with others, or publish it in our gallery for everyone to use.
We welcome any corrections or suggestions for improvements to this guide or to SearchMonkey itself. Please send all feedback to the SearchMonkey Yahoo! Group for Developers.
The SearchMonkey Guide contains information for SearchMonkey developers and site owners. It includes full documentation for the online developer tool, tutorials and best practices, overviews of microformats and RDF, and reference material for APIs and XML schemas used to build SearchMonkey applications.
There are two main audiences for the SearchMonkey Guide:
SearchMonkey developers are front end
engineers who build presentation
applications, small PHP
applications that enhance search results. Most presentation
applications are fairly simple and do not necessarily require deep
working knowledge of PHP. Developers should also understand XSLT and XPath, particularly if they
need to create custom data services. Since DataRSS is the common language SearchMonkey
uses for representing data from varied sources, developers should
understand the three basic elements
of DataRSS: <adjunct>,
<item>, <meta>, and their
attributes.
SearchMonkey site owners are site owners who are responsible for delivering data about their site's pages for SearchMonkey developers to build upon. One way to do this is to mark up pages with microformats, eRDF, or RDFa, which the Yahoo! Search Crawler can extract. Alternatively, site owners can construct feeds to serve data to SearchMonkey directly. This requires a strong working knowledge of the Atom 1.0 specification and how to embed DataRSS properly in Atom. Ideally, site owners should also have a basic understanding of how to use the SearchMonkey developer tool.
Site owners are responsible for data, while developers are responsible for presentation. Smaller projects might assign the developer and site owner roles to the same person, but larger projects tend to have more specialized roles.
The SearchMonkey Guide contains the following chapters:
Chapter 1, Overview — For both developers and site owners. Covers SearchMonkey fundamentals, including basic terminology, examples of what you can do with SearchMonkey, an overview of the structure of a SearchMonkey application, and a quickstart tutorial that leads you through the creation of a simple SearchMonkey application.
Chapter 2, Developer Guide — For developers. Describes how to use the SearchMonkey developer tool to build presentation applications and custom data services. Includes full documentation for using the SearchMonkey developer tool interface, detailed example code, addtitional in-depth tutorials, and best practices for application design.
Chapter 3, Site Owner Guide — For site owners, although developers might have some marginal interest. Describes how to provide structured data to SearchMonkey, either by creating an Atom / DataRSS feed or by embedding microformats and RDF in your existing markup.
Appendix A, DataRSS Specification — For site owners. Provides full reference documentation for DataRSS, a specification for embedding URL metadata in Atom feeds.
Appendix B, SearchMonkey vocabularies — For site owners. Provides full reference documentation for the vocabularies that SearchMonkey supports.
Appendix C, PHP Reference — For developers. Provides full reference documentation for SearchMonkey-specific PHP functions for extracting and mapping data, along with a whitelist of permitted PHP functions and classes.
Appendix D, FAQ: SearchMonkey and the Semantic Web ― For site owners. Provides additional information in a question and answer format about the semantic technology underlying SearchMonkey.