Filipino Web developers who want greater control over search results of Internet search pioneer Yahoo! will soon have that chance with the launch of Searchmonkey in the Philippines.
Cris Concepcion, Yahoo! Philippines business operations manager, said Searchmonkey allows site owners to customize their Yahoo search result listings by adding modules or applications on search engine results. These applications include images, deep links, reviews and even video.
“We provide the publishers control over how the search engine results or abstracts look like. We feel that the best people who can present an abstract are the source of the abstracts, which are the publishers of the websites,” he said at the two-day Search Engine Marketing Conference 2008 in Makati City, which started Tuesday.
SearchMonkey applications can be presented through enhanced results and infobars.
Once activated, a user searching for a restaurant on Yahoo! can see the enhanced results that will contain a site URL, a photo of the restaurant, a short description, links to other articles inside the site and even a review. Infobars, which appear directly below results, can include links to other resources.
In the US, Searchmonkey provides a gallery of different modules for the developers including a LinkedIn module for pictures and friends, a Wikipedia module for short descriptions and an Amazon module for reviews.
Concepcion said allowing publishers to “monkey around” with Yahoo! abstracts results in a richer experience for the consumer.
“One caveat is that Searchmonkey will not affect your search rankings so if you’re on page four, you still have to work on your search engine optimization. But if you’re on page one, this is a really exciting development especially if you’re a small or medium sized business trying to attract customers on the Web,” he said.
He said Searchmonkey will be a free service that will be offered initially to Web developers of most-visited sites such as ABS-CBN or Inquirer. A public rollout of Searchmonkey is expected either in the last quarter of 2008 or the first quarter of 2009, he added.
Another service that will soon be made available to local websites is the Build Your Own Search Service or BOSS. Concepcion said BOSS provides publishers and businesses a way to use Yahoo! search infrastructure and customize it so it can be valuable to their customers. He said that instead of a standard Yahoo! toolbar, the search service will not be branded but will allow developers to build and launch web-scale search products that utilize the entire Yahoo! Search index.
Eric Hsu, Yahoo! Search Marketing Southeast Asia senior manager for business development, said advertisers experienced an 89 percent increase in sales when they used search and display marketing at the same time. He said advertisers who used display got a nine percent increase in offline purchases while those who used search only got a 42 percent increase in sales.
He said an online campaign by Kentucky Fried Chicken in Yahoo! resulted in offline sales of KFC chicken fillet burgers that were 20 times higher than the actual cost of the campaign.