When Microsoft and Yahoo announced their search partnership plans just over a year ago, there were a number of unanswered questions about Yahoo’s future search-development efforts.

On August 17, Yahoo answered a number of those questions via a blog post on the Yahoo Developer Network site. As Yahoo transitions not just its search results, but also its search back-end infrastructure to Microsoft, a number of Yahoo’s search application-programming interfaces (APIs) and Web services are going to be affected, Yahoo officials said.

Microsoft isn’t expected to “fully power” the Yahoo Search back-end globally until some time in 2012, the Yahoos said, but later this week the back-end transition for Yahoo Search in the U.S. and Canada will commence. (”Keep an eye out for the ‘Powered by Bing’ indicator at the bottom of our search results page, which will indicate that you are viewing listings from Microsoft,” Yahoo officials blogged.)

One of the results of the back-end search tweaks is that Yahoo will drop SearchMonkey, its search platform that enables site owners to customize search results. On October 1, 2010, Yahoo is going to close the SearchMonkey developer tool, gallery, and app preferences, officials said.

“Yahoo! Search is continuing to shift from a model where developers build lightweight apps to install on Yahoo! to one where publishers enhance their own site markup to produce similar results. Yahoo! Search results pages will continue to show enhanced result templates from websites’ page markup and structured data feeds along with Microsoft’s organic listings,” explained Neal Sample, Yahoo Vice President of Social, Open, & Publishing Platforms, in a blog post.

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Yahoo to close SearchMonkey as Microsoft search integration proceeds | ZDNet

Posted By: JMH
18 Aug 2010