Yahoo Searchmonkey is a way for developers and site owners to modify Yahoo search listings in a way never before available.

With SearchMonkey, site owners create “applications” for Yahoo search that can be installed by users in the same sense that Facebook applications can be installed.

Instead of search results consisting of a simple title, abstract and URL, for the first time users will see rich results that incorporate the massive amount of information buried in websites — reviews, images, deep links, and all other kinds of other useful data — directly on the Yahoo! Search results page.

Here is a before and after example of a modified search result for a listing in Yelp.

The service was until recently in private beta and users had to install the add-ons to see enhanced search results. The majority of users don’t take the time to customize aspects of their browser and search options for google or yahoo so the appeal of this beyond developers was pretty limited

Yahoo! recently turned on several of those applications (Yahoo! Local, Yelp, and LinkedIn) for all searchers by default.

Now anyone can customize their Linkedin and Facebook results to appear like mine below hopefully in the near future more services are turned on by default enabling a better search experience for all users

Tags: yahoo, search monkey, southwestseo, seo, linkedin, facebook, yelp