Starting to Monkey Around With Yahoo! Search Monkey

Starting to Monkey Around With Yahoo! Search Monkey “ You’ll never make a monkey out of me” Neil Crosby (One of Yahoo!’s Monkeys in London)

What is Search Monkey?
A way to create more interesting Search Results.
Enhanced results and Infobar.
Enhanced results fit a tight template, infobars can be far more freeform.

Some Normal Search Results

Monkey Monkey Monkey!

Where does the data come from?
Microformats
RDFa
Or pull it in from the page using XSLT

My First Monkey
Start with something containing microformats.
FaceBook’s public profile pages fit the bill.
We’ll build a monkey that shows the user’s profile picture.
Go to http://developer.search.yahoo.com/

Starting your Monkey – Basic Info
Name
Description
Category (for gallery)
Icon (really important)
Don’t forget to agree to the T&C

URLs
Use auto-generate first.
Then choose specific URL for first field.
First URL is used to generate previews in gallery.

Data Services
We can ignore this for now since we’re using µformats that are built into Search Monkey.

Appearance
This is where we’ll actually do some work.
You must change something from the default here.

Using the right hand rail
+/- expands/contracts sections.
Clicking an item pastes that data into your PHP at the cursor.

Making our changes
$ret['image']['src'] = Data::get('com.yahoo.uf.hcard/rel:Card/vcard:photo/@resource');
And that’s all there is to creating a simple monkey!

Let others play with your monkey
Once you’re happy with your monkey, share it.
Let users add your monkey to their SERPs.
Share your source if you want to.

Monkey 2: Robotic Monkey of Doom
We want a Flickr Monkey that:
Shows main/first photo on a page.
Includes relevant information about photo.
No relevant µformats on the page, so we need some XSLT.
Will be slower than pre-spidered µFormats.
We need to create a data service.

Creating the Data Service
Starts the same as a µFormat Monkey does.
Basic Info.
URLs.
Trigger: *.flickr.com/photos/*
First test: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thevoicewithin/1276763134/

Now for some XSLT
Scary, but not too scary
Be aware of allowable rel values – see documentation .

XSLT First Pass
We want to extract an image URL and a description.
Assume the only page type is the single photo page for now.
Use Firebug and/or XPather in Firefox to work out XPaths to our required nodes.

XSLT First Pass
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">
<xsl:template match="/">
<adjunctcontainer>
<adjunct id="smid:{$smid}" version="1.0">
<item rel="rel:Photo"
resource="{//div[@class='photoImgDiv']/img[@class='reflect']/@src}">
<meta property="dc:description">
<xsl:value-of select="//div[@class='photoDescription']"/>
</meta>
</item>
</adjunct>
</adjunctcontainer>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Save & Refresh
Check that we don’t get any errors.
Then, back to the homepage.

Making our Flickr Monkey
Give it a name
Trigger: *.flickr.com/photos/*
First Test: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thevoicewithin/1276763134/

Flickr Monkey Data Services
“ Add More Data Services”
Because we’re using the same URL trigger for monkey and data source, the source shows up here

Flickr Monkey Appearance
Point and click info from the data source.
$ret['summary'] = Data::get('smid: DATA_SRC_ID /rel:Photo/dc:description');
$ret['image']['src'] = Data::get('smid: DATA_SRC_ID /rel:Photo/@resource');

But Flickr’s more complex than that!
Flickr doesn’t just have individual photo pages under *.flickr.com/photos/*
Also has tag, user, set etc pages.
We should handle this at our end, so users only have to add one monkey.

Enter xsl:choose
Allows if-elseif-else statements in XSL.
<xsl:choose>
<xsl:when test="some_test">
<item>...</item>
</xsl:when>
<xsl:when test="some_other_test">
<item>...</item>
</xsl:when>
<xsl:otherwise>
<item>...</item>
</xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>

Here’s one I made earlier
http://gallery.search.yahoo.com/application?smid=w4q.s (source available)

And we’re done…
There’s lots more you can go away and do.
We haven’t even looked at infobars.
You can also fiddle with web services.
There’s a whole world of opportunity.
[email_address]
http://developer.search.yahoo.com/

Thankyou.
Any questions?
These slides are available at:
http://icanhaz.com/monkeys
(redirects to http://www.slideshare.net/neilcrosby/starting-to-monkey-around-with-yahoo-search-monkey/ )

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Starting to Monkey Around With Yahoo! Search Monkey

by Neil Crosby

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