Can you imagine being able to add videos, presentations or games to your organic search engine listings?

It’s almost too far fetched an idea to really believe, but Yahoo! are making it a reality. Using their SearchMonkey script tools, webmasters will actually be able to embed media into their SERPs listings.

Giving webmasters the ability to make their listings more interactive and engaging on face value seems like a good idea, but it makes you wonder what impact it will have on the searcher experience, should this take off.

A page full of listings with various videos and other media could be quite distracting and disruptive. That said, it provides a solid point of difference between Yahoo! and it’s primary competitiors Google and Microsoft.

According to the release post:

The premise is simple: if you have a flash video, game, or document (like a presentation or spreadsheet) embedded on a page, adding a few lines of code will make it appear as an enhanced result after we recrawl your page. Very little semantic markup knowledge is required, and you don’t have to build your own application. SearchMonkey does the heavy lifting, taking your markup and extracting the necessary structured data to display it as an enhanced result.

So how does a webmaster go about adding media to their Yahoo! listings? All it takes is the addition of some simple code. Below is an example snippet of code that Hulu used:

<link rel=”image_src” href=”http://thumbnails.hulu.com/9/967/32912_145×80_generated__VfWxSNY3rESG1ntOzexNRQ.jpg” />
<link rel=”video_src” href=”http://www.hulu.com/embed/GREW9Qw0P7KjIyjJydQYRw” />
<meta name=”video_height” content=”296″/>
<meta name=”video_width” content=”512″/>
<meta name=”description” content=”Video description: Homer gets upset at a vending machine filled with apples.”/><meta name=”video_type” content=”application/x-shockwave-flash”/>

The code generates the listing below.

Once the video is clicked on, an expanded version of the listing is displayed with the video re sized for easier viewing.

This sort of feature is likely to draw abuse, so all media added to the SERPs via Search Monkey will be reviewed by the Yahoo! team before it goes live.

So what do you think? Will you be using this SearchMonkey feature to enhance your listings?
If you’ve given it a try – share your experience with the rest of us.

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