Yahoo notified me a few days ago in an email that their SearchMonkey program is about to undergo a change, with their developer tools, gallery and application preferences set to close down on October 1st.
I wrote a few of the 163 search applications which were officially approved for the gallery:
Nostalgically, I’m bummed that the application development tools and gallery are going away. The Yahoo! team’s concept of enabling webmasters to have some say in custom-designing their own listings’ appearance in the search results was visionary. Marketers salivated at the prospect, and literally hundreds of people approached them in hopes of getting more influence over the search listings.
Indeed, the enhanced search result listings reportedly got around a 15% higher clickthrough rate, verifying many marketer’s theories that the jazzier listings would attract more attention from searchers, resulting in more conversion activities. (more…)
