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Creating the Feed

To submit a SearchMonkey feed for your site, use Yahoo! Site Explorer. Yahoo! Site Explorer will validate your feed submission. See SearchMonkey Feed Submission Overview for more information on feeds and feed validation.

[Note] Note

When creating your SearchMonkey feeds or if you used one of the SearchMonkey Getting Started templates, you can use the SearchMonkey validator found further down on the Getting Started page titled VALIDATE YOUR MARKUP:. This SearchMonkey validator will validate the SearchMonkey markup you use and display them at the top with a "Success! there's a Product" message. Any other microformat or RDFa markup you used, that is not SearchMonkey specific, will be displayed below the recognized SearchMonkey markup. This is a markup validator only and will test for your SearchMonkey enhanced result.

What are DataRSS and OPML Feeds?

DataRSS is a specification for conveying structured data for URLs. Each URL in a DataRSS feed has one or more adjuncts that represent the metadata for an actual resource, such as a product listing, or a product review. The adjunct groups the related metadata from a particular source on a page. For more information see Understanding DataRSS in the SearchMonkey documentation.

Outline Processor Markup Language (OPML) is a file format for storing outlines and exchanging subscription lists (pointers) between feed readers and aggregators. In SearchMonkey, OPML feed files are a "master list" of feed URLs that "point" to multiple DataRSS feed files. The maximum size of an individual DataRSS feed file is 50 MB or 50,000 URLs. Using OPML with SearchMonkey, for feeds, you can provide multiple feed files which can exceed this limit.

Site Explorer Feed Requirements

SearchMonkey supports feeds in the following formats:

[Note] Note

Yahoo! also recognizes files types with a .gz extension as compressed files and will decompress these files prior to validation.

  • Outline Processor Markup Language (OPML). Additional information can be found at http://www.opml.org/ or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPML. OPML files are typically lists of XML file "pointers" where the feed information originates and OPML can display that information in the form of an outline.

    If you are submitting a large number of feed files, instead of typing each feed URL/XML file location into Site Explorer, create an OPML file which "points" to all your DataRSS XML files.

OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language)

The following is an example of the OPML feed that is accepted by SearchMonkey.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?><opml version="1.1">

<head>
  <title>SearchMonkey Feeds</title>
    <dateCreated>Fri, 01 Aug 2008 12:00:00
     GMT</dateCreated><dateModified>Tue Sep 30 14:58:10 PDT
     2008</dateModified>
    <ownerName>Monkey</ownerName>
    <ownerEmail>banana@yahoo.com</ownerEmail>
</head>
<body>
  <outline
   xmlUrl="http://[searchmonkey.feedurl.com]/[subdirectory]/[sep04-
   21]/[Blog_Delivery1_feed1.xml]"/>
  <outline
   xmlUrl="http://[searchmonkey.feedurl.com]/[subdirectory]/[sep04-
   21]/[Blog_Delivery2_feed2.xml]"/>
</body>
</opml>

  • DataRSS XML. This feed format is based on the Atom Syndication Format 1.0 (RFC 4287). A feed must be a valid instance of this format, as indicated by off-the-shelf feed validation tools. Like conventional feeds, each URL corresponds to one entry in the feed, represented in Atom with an entry element. Each entry must have:

    • an id for the URL of the page without a fragment identifier, # and subsequent characters

      This is a globally unique value based on the combination of a reversed domain name and publishing group within that organization. If in doubt, err on the side of more fine-grained identification.

    • an updated timestamp

    • a title

    • a <y:adjunct> and related elements. DataRSS extends Atom 1.0 with a “y” namespace, which enables you to attach metadata for SearchMonkey to each URL in the feed.

  • Feeds can also be submitted to SearchMonkey through ftp/ftps connections and are also validated and authenticated. Contact your Yahoo! Account Manager for more information and details.

For more information about these two feed formats:

NewsML DataRSS

NewsML is an XML format that supports news data, groups of news data, and connections between news data and linked metadata. . For more information on the NewsML format see the following:

Yahoo! SearchMonkey requires the following NewsML elements for a successful feed submission:

  1. newsItem: Main container for the individual news items: Every newsItem can contain multiple newsComponent containers which encapsulate the different parts of the news: like newsContent, news images, news photos.

  2. AssociatedWith element should specify the URL of the news article off which the newsML is based. It is a compulsory field for newsML feed submission to Yahoo!

  3. Other elements in the NewsML feed pass on the metadata of the news articles to Yahoo! Search index.

Sample NewsML

To see an example of a correctly developed NewsML feed, click http://search.dev.corp.ird.yahoo.com:15001/help/objects/news and click on the NewsML tab.

Google Base

Google Base is a database supported by Google that accepts various forms of content such as structured mark-up, images, and tab-separated value (TSV). For more information see the Google Base web site, http://base.google.com. To submit Google Base feeds, to the Yahoo! index, you must use the following formats and tools:

  1. Your data must be one of these feed formats:

  2. You must submit your feeds through Yahoo!'s Site Explorer at: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit. Yahoo! Search then indexes your feed submission and makes the data available to SearchMonkey for building enhanced search result applications that are displayed on the Yahoo! search results page. See SearchMonkey Feed Submission Overview below for more information.

The following are supported Google Base feed types:

  • Products

  • Events

  • Personals

  • Reviews

  • Jobs

Non-supported Google Base feed types:

  • Housing

  • Vehicles

  • Custom Type

For more information on Google Base see the following: