Yahoo Celebrates the Year of the Monkey

By Tom Dunlap

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- For Yahoo, it's the Year of the Monkey.

No, not by the Asian calendar (what year is this anyway?), and no, Yahoo doesn't (yet) have a room full of simians writing code.

We're talking SearchMonkey, Yahoo's groundbreaking, semantic web-focused, open-developer application platform that launched in May 2008. Yahoo's platform isn't that widely known by those outside the semantic zoo, but it truly is important for the semantic web movement when a player of Yahoo's magnitude supports things like the RDF standard (a key semweb underpinning).

Here's an excellent primer on SearchMonkey from the Yahoo Developer Network.

I attended Yahoo's presentation today called, "Year of the Monkey: Lessons from the First Year of SearchMonkey," at the SemTech 2009 Conference here. The presentation was part of the conference's "Search Day," a day so chock full of search news and views that even those who go all a-quiver by the words "search results" grew tired of hearing about queries, relevancy, structured AND unstructured data, microformats, relational databases, or how "semanticized" a particular search engine was.

Unfortunately, (or fortunately, as it turned out) when I walked into the SearchMonkey presentation, I started thinking about the Year of the Monkey. Then, from deep in my cerebral cortex, a song from my youth re-appeared and wouldn't leave. Yes, I'm talking Al Stewart's 1976 hit, "The Year of the Cat." It stayed in my head during the whole presentation. (If you like 70s hair, check the Cat video on YouTube.)

I've always said that, after email, looking up lyrics is the Web's true killer app. That, and looking up movie reviews and times. I'd hoped that, by keeping my ears on the Yahoo presenter, I could find the song's lyrics and then somehow fit them with my SearchMonkey theme. But even I couldn't get Stewart's words to bend that far.

It all turned out for the best, because even though SearchMonkey is cool and cutting edge, the presentation was REALLY boring. The speaker was too soft spoken for the late-afternoon, eyes-beginning-to-droop crowd, and the writing on the slides was too small. I was able to glean that some 15,000 developers have signed up in the past year to work on SearchMonkey.

Oh well, "the drum-beat strains of the night remain" and I'm on to the next presentation.