Look, everyone who has ever read any of my PC Pro columns over the years will know that I am something of a Firefox Fanboy, just like anything that makes my web browsing more efficient and effective. Which is probably why I think the whole Yahoo SearchMonkey thing is just simply bananas.
Basically, you can use Yahoo’s SearchMonkey technology to tart up your web searching or at least that’s the idea. The Beta version of the Yahoo Search Gallery has been launched, and this features a whole host of plug-in enhancements that are meant to make searching a better looking experience.
So you get enhancements from the likes of LinkedIn, IMDB, Epicurious, WebMD and the like to provide additional wrappers for your search data: want ratings by your movie hits, or perhaps maps next to restaurant listings, well that’s the kind of thing to expect.
Yahoo itself says that SearchMonkey lets programmers package search results on the site with more sophistication, opening up the web search concept to third party developers in order to bring a richer and more semantic web approach to the where the heck is it party. Of course, Yahoo’s own in-house developed stuff is switched on by default for your Yahoo search, or at least 3 of them are: a video player, hotel info application and a Flickr viewer. The most popular, however, appears to be the LinkedIn plug-in that shows LinkedIn profiles alongside search results.
And why do I not approve of this advance, of this added functionality, of this extended search concept? Because all I really want are results that are accurate and relevant, that get delivered as quickly as possible, and which are not buried within a screen full of fancy wrapping. No matter which SearchMonkey extensions are running it slows down the search process because you have to wait, in effect, for all those additional little web pages within your web page to load before you are presented with the full picture. It does nothing to improve relevancy, just brings a load of frankly irrelevant waffle into the search arena. That plug-in will bring less relevant results to the top, pushing them at you and crying ‘but they look nice’ as a defence.
I am not buying it, in fact I am pushing for a return to the early days of Google when all you got was a search box to start with and a text based list of accurate and relevant results to finish. Which is probably why I find myself using the text only, totally stripped back to basics, mobile Google search more and more these days.
