Lately, I've been playing around with Yahoo SearchMonkey, the cool new search platform which can enhance and augment Yahoo's search results. Anyone can create a SearchMonkey app, which is basically a snippet of PHP code that pipes in information from multiple data services and outputs some HTML. After you install a SearchMonkey app (from Yahoo's gallery), the app will be triggered by certain URLs in the results page of a Yahoo search, and will either replace the default result with an enhanced format or add a small button under the result (called an Infobar) that you can click to view the app's output.

Here are a few apps that I've made which have been accepted into Yahoo's gallery:

• RottenTomatoes Actor Profile
• Wikipedia TOC
• Enhanced Digg Story
• Blogspot Recent Posts
• MTV Artist Info

Here are the MTV and Digg apps in action:

In a later post I'll walk through the steps I took to create my Blogspot app, to give an idea of what the development process looks like, and how SearchMonkey works behind the scenes.