When Yahoo announced Search Monkey, its developer platform for search, it also announced the SearchMonkey Developer Challenge, which was going to reward the best search extensions based on SearchMonkey. Today, Yahoo announced the winners: StumbleUpon, BooRah, computer scientist Greg Schechter, and David Hickley from GEDview.com. The grand prize of $10,000 went to Marco Vitanza, for his Blogspot Infobar.
While it didn’t win the grand prize, the most interesting and probably also the most useful of these extensions is StumbleUpon’s, which won the prize for “Most Innovative Use of Structured Data.” Once you activate StumbleUpon’s Infobar, every search result in Yahoo Search will display a set of tags, as well as user reviews of every listed site and a list of users who liked the site on StumbleUpon.
Also interesting is BooRah‘s Infobar, which automatically displays restaurant reviews from BooRah users together with the search results. BooRah won the prize for “Best Infobar.”
Just this week, Yahoo opened up its search APIs even wider, when it announced a new program named BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service). While developers who participated in the SearchMonkey Challenge were restricted to mashing up their own data with results from Yahoo’s search, BOSS will allow developers to use all of Yahoo’s search index in (hopefully) innovative ways.
While Yahoo is clearly struggling in many ways today, it is great to see that it is still trying to foster innovation in the search space.
