Google may be outperforming Yahoo Search in terms of market share, but with programs like Search Monkey and BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service), Yahoo is still trying to innovate in the search space. Today, Yahoo announced a new feature that integrates Yahoo Search with some of Facebook‘s core functions. Whenever you see a Facebook profile in your search results, you can now directly add somebody as a friend, send messages, see their friends, or poke them.
In order for this to work, you have to first activate the Facebook SearchMonkey app and be signed in to Facebook. Update: The SearchMonkey app is actually turned on by default for all Yahoo Search users now (but you can opt out at any time).
After that, whenever a Facebook profile appears in your search results, it will include this person’s public profile picture, as well as an additional line with the basic Facebook commands (add friend, poke, send message, view friends). According to Yahoo, Facebook shared this structured data with the SearchMonkey app by adding semantic markup to its public profile pages.
Maybe more importantly, though, features like this show that there is still a lot of life left in Yahoo Search. As Marshall Kirkpatrick noted a few weeks ago, things may not be looking too rosy for Yahoo in business terms, but the company is at least trying out a lot of cool search-related technologies.
