Anyway, I think some of the comments that say that Erik misses the point, are themselves missing the point.

Erik pointed out–and Amit concurred–that if you allow a particular plug-in into your world, then that is a pretty clear statement of your preferences. The argument about spam doesn’t stand up, since if I chose the LinkedIn extensions, then I obviously want them, and if I don’t want them, I can turn them off again.

Of course that doesn’t mean that this is there today, but as Amit said, Yahoo! will be looking into it.

(It’s no different to putting the weather forecast as the first result, if I search for “London, UK”; why not put LinkedIn above any other occurrences of a person’s name, if I chose LinkedIn, or last.fm at the top if I searched for a band, if I have enabled the last.fm plug-in?)

But the reason I’m responding to this point, rather than just letting it fly by, is that there is an important underlying principle here, which is that semantic information is not just ‘tagged data’, but also user behaviour. For example, if in GMail I say “always allow images for this email address”, I’ve given a pretty good steer about the relationship I have with that email address. That information is legitimate ’semantic’ information, just as much as any structured data is.

The same goes here; it’s true that Erik is asking for SearchMonkey to do slightly more than it currently does. But that extra functionality he suggests is exactly the kind of thing that is needed if we are to make the semantic aspect of the web usable.

Anyway…interesting post…interesting service…interesting times…but now I better get back to building tools for the semantic web.

Mark

webBackplane
http://webBackp...om/mark-birbeck

We hear you saying you want that, but that’s not how it’s designed (now) and that’s not what it does (now). We hear what you’re saying, but you are acting as if it’s broken when it’s doing what it’s designed to do. “By selecting and adding these apps, I am explicitly telling Yahoo that I am interested in seeing Yelp results or LinkedIn results or Epicurious results or whatever.” (No, you aren’t. You are wanting that, that’s it.)

I asked my toilet to come into the room and position itself under my ass, but it didn’t do it — my toilet must be broken or maybe it’s not even a toilet.

Right now though I’m finding the set-up app too flaky and unreliable to get it to do what I’m after. Maybe it’s my poor brain, and i know it’s Beta, but needs more work IMHO.

Your argument is “i see they made a car that travels on the road, but it’s so bad that it can’t even fly to the moon?”. Well, if you want to fly to the moon, use a friggin spaceship.

http://suggesti...op=searchmonkey

Thanks,
Amit

“SearchMonkey only lets developers change the display, not the order of the results.”

What I am arguing, as I have in the past (see second link) is that Yahoo should allow the re-ordering of results so that others can actually help them make a better search engine. My frustrations as a user with these Search Gallery apps is a case in point.

@Harsh, really, what I was looking for is on page 2 of results? Fail.

Good search is about figuring out my intent. By selecting and adding these apps, I am explicitly telling Yahoo that I am interested in seeing Yelp results or LinkedIn results or Epicurious results or whatever. But it doesn’t seem to do me much good.

Thanks for your comments on the SearchMonkey Gallery. Very useful feedback. The Gallery is in Beta right now, so we’re incorporating suggestions as we build out the final version.

One clarification, however – SearchMonkey is a useful overlay of structured data on top of the organic search results – so if a certain site doesn’t show up for a certain search query, their app won’t show up. Put another way, SearchMonkey doesn’t effect the ranking of results. That said, a user adding an application for a site is a clear expression of preference, so as we roll out SearchMonkey and it becomes a rich source of user data we will evaluate factoring it into our relevance model.

Amit

I with agree with part of Erick’s assessment – it’s really hard to find results for some apps unless you know how the app works. But the SearchMonkey platform itself is pretty powerful and gives developers a lot of flexibility to treat their results differently if they want.

Here’s the link to our app – http://gallery....cation?smid=gBV

Adding an application is basically implicit consent — you add the application because you want to see the enhanced information. Erick’s search for “U2″ should have put the Last.fm result somewhere near the top, regardless of its actual ranking.

It’s just not that useful if application-enhanced results aren’t given priority over normal results.

That, or Yahoo! can break their search results into a two-three column layout, with application-enhanced relevant search results being displayed in a column to the right somewhere.

http://search.y...+site%3Alast.fm

As I stated in my other post, perhaps Yahoo should just add the site:example.com tag automatically to the searches after you customize results for 1 site.

That would be less confusing for people that really want to do site search.

Then they could have a radio button that is auto-checked on lastfm. site search but with another radio that says “search the web” next to it.