Earlier this year, Yahoo! initiated discussions about opening up Yahoo! Search to web site owners and developers in an effort to enhance the functionality, appearance and usefulness of its search results.

April 24th marked the release of the developer platform, named SearchMonkey. Whether this title accurately predicts the usefulness of the new initiative is yet to be seen, but it was an obvious marketing play, if the release post titled “start monkeying around” is anything to go by.

And now to the monkey business. What can website owners and would-be developers do with the new SearchMonkey platform. According to the release:

• Site owners can build enhanced search results that will provide searchers with a more useful experience by including links, images and name-value pairs in the search results for their pages (likely resulting in an increase in traffic quantity and quality)

• Developers can build SearchMonkey apps that enhance search results, access Yahoo! Search’s user base and help shape the next generation of search

• Users can customize their search experience with apps built by or for their favorite sites

The SearchMonkey release coincides with other significant changes and the news that Yahoo! is transforming itself into an open and social platform from the ground up.

Together with SearchMonkey, they’re unifying all their social properties creating user synergies across various Yahoo! social sites and apps under the technical architecture known as Y!OS – Yahoo! Open Strategy.

Yahoo! has announced more improvements and new releases in the last few months, than since I can remember. Seems the good old Y! had a few tricks up its sleeve – good timing given the heat from both shareholders and Microsoft.

Will it all pay off – I guess we’ll find out soon enough. Til then, if you’re interested in monkeying around – then sign up for the SearchMonkey preview.

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