Giv Parvaneh

I have to admit I can’t remember the last time I used Yahoo as a search engine. But I recently looked into Yahoo’s Search Monkey and was very impressed. Normally, you create your web page, Google picks it up and provided you’ve got a proper HTML title, meta tags etc, Google will display the title and description in its search results. Well and good. But wouldn’t it be nice if you had some control over how the search results were displayed?

Have a look at the search results for “The Smith” in Yahoo’s search engine. Notice how the Last.fm results display extra information such as genre, similar artists and even a thumbnail:

I think this is pretty amazing and it would be perfect for museum collection objects.

Here’s a result from the British Museum with the default search engine format:

It doesn’t really look any different from any other search record. So let’s beautify it a bit by showing the object thumbnail, the dimensions and the owner:

Much nicer. This took me just a few minutes to achieve and you can pretty much put anything you like in these result blocks. It doesn’t require any extra set-up from your end and all you need to do is to tell Yahoo which elements on the page you want to display using XPath.

There’s obviously a lot more you can do with Search Monkey. You can set up patterns to apply the same format to all your pages and you can even use your own custom data feeds to display information that doesn’t exists on the page.

I’m hoping Google will do something similar very soon.