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Create a Yahoo! SearchMonkey application

Enhance your search result listings using RDF, XSLT and PHP

Rob Crowther (robert@crowther.info), Web developer, Freelance

Rob Crowther is a Web Developer from London and is currently moderator of the Exploring Semantic Web Technologies forum on developerWorks. He has a keen interest in Web Standards and blogs sporadically at http://www.boogdesign.com/b2evo/.

Summary: SearchMonkey is one of the first attempts from a major search engine to make use of Semantic Web technologies to enhance search results. In this tutorial, you will implement a Yahoo! SearchMonkey application that enhances blogger.com search listings to include other information about the blog and blog owner. You will first implement a basic application using the default data available from Yahoo!. Then you will create a custom data service to provide your own structured data to SearchMonkey before you develop a more advanced application that takes advantage of this new custom data service.

Date: 14 Oct 2008
Level: Intermediate
PDF: A4 and Letter (786 KB | 32 pages)Get Adobe® Reader®

Activity: 15399 views
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Before you start

This tutorial is intended for Web application developers ready to create their first SearchMonkey application. Once you complete this tutorial, you will have a good understanding of the value SearchMonkey adds for users and site owners. You should be acquainted with basic PHP syntax and familiarity with DOM, XSLT and XPath will also be beneficial. For some introductory links, see Resources.

About this tutorial

Frequently used acronyms

DOM: Document Object Model
HTML: Hypertext Markup Language
PHP: PHP Hypertext Preprocessor
RDF: Resource Description Framework
URL: Uniform Resource Locator
W3C: World Wide Web Consortium
XHTML: Extensible Hypertext Markup Language
XML: Extensible Markup Language
XSL: Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations

SearchMonkey is the first product from a mainstream search engine provider that takes advantage of Semantic Web technologies to enable you to produce more relevant search results and thus drive more traffic to your Web site. With common Web development technologies such as PHP, XSLT, and XPath, provide a better experience for searchers as you use structured data encoded in Web pages using Semantic Web standards such as Microformats, eRDF, and RDFa. In this tutorial you will:

Learn how SearchMonkey allows you to leverage existing Semantic Web content through presentation applications
Create a presentation application that enhances blogspot.com search results using the online wizard and some basic PHP
Build your own custom data service to pull further structured data from blogspot.com pages using XSLT, XPath, and the XPather Firefox Extension
Create a second presentation application that includes the data from your custom data service

Prerequisites

You will need the following tools to follow along with this tutorial:

Sign up for a SearchMonkey developer account. This requires a Yahoo! ID if you don't already have one.
You will use the XPather extension which, in version 3 and above of Firefox, also requires that you install the DOM Inspector plugin.
Get PHP v5.2.
Also, this tutorial uses Blogger as the example Web site. An account there is not required but might be useful.