Subject: thoughts/opinions about Yahoo's SearchMonkey?

From: "Peter Keane" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 Oct 2008 20:45:51 -0500

Does anyone here in the Atom world have thoughts or opinions about
Yahoo's SearchMonkey and related specs, esp. DataRSS [1]?
SearchMonkey is obviously aimed at improving search for producers and
consumers, but the approach to adding metadata to resources has wide
applicability.  Not that it's the be-all and end-all, but rather
another interesting point of triangulation on the problem(s) that we
are all trying to address.

I keep seeing DataRSS as a more generic MediaRSS (also from Yahoo),
although I am not sure that's an accurate take.  It also looks like a
way to use RDF (by way of RDFa mechanisms) with an Atom feed.  I also
see it as a pretty clean and easily understandable way to add
arbitrary metadata to a link (something which I feel like we need, and
which has been discussed here many times before).

Essentially, you create an "adjunct" extension that live in an
atom:entry. It's repeatable, in that multiple parties can make an
assertion about a particular resource.  By the way, the docs talk
about DataRSS as a "specification for conveying structured data for
URLs," which in the context of SearchMonkey mean that when a
particular URL is turned up in a search result, this adjunct is ready
in the wings to provide the metadata for a nicely presented Google
OneBox style summary.  Within the adjunct, you can have "meta"
elements (key-value pairs describing the adjunct) and/or "items"
(think atom:link) which in turn can have meta elements.
Interestingly, items can contain other items, which makes for a
powerful, if potentially unwieldy structure.

Perhaps to deal with some of that potential explosion of complexity
and non-standard approaches, they offer both a recommended set of
vocabularies to use with DataRSS [2] and a set of sample DataRSS for
various common content types [3].

--peter keane

[1] http://developer.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/smguide/understand_datarss.html
[2] http://developer.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/smguide/profile_vocab.html
[3] http://developer.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/smguide/datarss-examples.html