Yahoo enhances SearchMonkey developer platform

Yahoo is hoping to make its search functionality more compelling

Yahoo has launched new functionality for its SearchMonkey developer platform, designed to allow site owners and developers to more easily embed content in Yahoo search results.

The company hopes that, by enabling users to preview rich content on the search results page, the firm's search offering will become more user friendly and compelling than rival offerings.

The SearchMonkey team at Yahoo said in a blog post that any site owner with content like Flash video, games or documents embedded in web pages would be able to add a few lines of code to make the page appear as an enhanced Yahoo search result.

"Very little semantic markup knowledge is required, and you don't have to build your own application," said the post. "SearchMonkey does the heavy lifting, taking your markup and extracting the necessary structured data to display it as an enhanced result."

Yahoo also announced that its Pingbox application is now available for Facebook. The app will let Facebook users chat using Yahoo Messenger rather than the social networking site's own instant messaging function.