Yahoo today announced a new feature for SearchMonkey that makes it very easy for site owners to embed flash videos, games, and documents directly on the Yahoo Search results page. The first sites to make use of this new feature are Hulu, Metacafe, and YouTube. Whenever a video from these sites appears in your search results, you can now watch it immediately in an embedded player right on the search results page.
SearchMonkey supports a number of popular video players, including Hulu, YouTube, and MetaCafe, as well as documents from Scribd and Slideshare, and Playcrafter games. Embedding these documents in the search results is relatively easy, and Yahoo provides content owners with an extensive set of helpful documents to get them started. To embed a video, for example, a developer only needs to add two lines of code. Videos are already appearing in Yahoo’s search results now, and documents and games will become available in the next month or so.
Google, of course, also shows thumbnails for YouTube clips in its search results, but clicking on these will take you to YouTube and won’t open the video player right on the page.
Yahoo says that it wants to make it easier for developers to make use of SearchMonkey. SearchMonkey is an extremely powerful tool, but it can also be very hard to use for somebody who doesn’t have the technical knowledge required to create a SearchMonkey app. Thanks to this new feature, even novice webmasters will now be able to embed some of the most popular forms of content on Yahoo’s search results page.
As we have said before, Yahoo continues to develop new and innovative ways to enhance its search, but so far, this hasn’t made too much of a dent in Google’s market share. Breaking Google’s momentum will be very hard for any player in the search engine market, but if anything, Yahoo is clearly showing that it is not willing to throw in the towel just yet.
