Community Man Random thoughts & deliberate clicks of a social media sidekick

SearchMonkey arrives in Southeast Asia

This was my post that got lost last week due to server problems.  It's a week late but still blog-worthy, especially if you're based in Southeast Asia.

After making much noise in different tech blogs  last year, Yahoo! SearchMonkey quietly launched in the Southeast Asia market last February 12, 2008, specifically in Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

In a nutshell, SearchMonkey basically opens up Yahoo! Search for users, developers and publishers to make search results more useful and visually more compelling.

Check out this before and after image:

BEFORE

AFTER

That’s just the tip of the iceberg, there are various SearchMonkey applications that transform your Yahoo! Search experience to provide you with highly relevant content and the best user experience at the same time.  In other words, it makes search fun, productive and exciting!  Check out these examples:

Play videos on the search results page: http://ph.search.yahoo.com/search?p=yodel+contest+video.

Add the latest Flickr photos to all Wikipedia results:

Go here (http://ph.gallery.search.yahoo.com/application?smid=JrLH) to add the application.

Show any geo-encoded Wikipedia content on a map:

Try it yourself by adding http://ph.gallery.search.yahoo.com/application?smid=2D1e.

It’s up to you how you wish to flavor your search experience.  And given that this is an open platform, there are so many ways this will grow and continue to improve, it just depends on how users, developers and publishers will build on it.  I can just imagine, being able to see what’s being tweeted about a keyword you’re searching for, or being able to see if a person you’re searching for is online and immediately chat with them.

Like I said, the possibilities are tremendous, and you can start experiencing it now by adding more SearchMonkey applications from this gallery: http://ph.gallery.search.yahoo.com.   You can also contribute apps by heading over to http://developer.yahoo.com/search/.