Table of Contents
Site Owners have web sites containing the data retrieved by SearchMonkey applications. To be used by SearchMonkey applications, this data must be structured. Site owners can make structured data available to Yahoo! in any of the following ways:
Atom Feeds — Site owners push data to Yahoo! by submitting Atom feeds.
Markup ― Site owners markup up their web pages with microformats or RDFa/eRDF, extracted by Yahoo! when crawling these URLs.
Web Services ― Site owners create custom Web Services that provide access to their structured data.
![[Note]](images/docbook/note.png) |
Note |
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RDFa support is not currently available. This will become available when the specification has stabilized in the community. |
This chapter contains the following sections:
Factors to Consider When Choosing a Data Delivery Method ― Provides information that can help you decide which data delivery method to choose.
A Comparison of Data Delivery Methods ― Describes the different ways that site owners can provide data to SearchMonkey applications.
Submitting Feeds ― Explains the process of sending Atom feeds to SearchMonkey, explaining how to select content to include in the feed and how to create and publish the feed. This section also provides further details on the dataRSS format and the searchmonkey_profile vocabulary.
Using Semantic Web Data ― Describes the methods supported by SearchMonkey that site owners can use to embed data into their web pages, Microformats and RDF.
There are several factors to consider when choosing one of these methods to provide your data to SearchMonkey.
If the freshness of the data is a concern, custom data services can retrieve the most current data from your website. It can take several days for Yahoo! to crawl the markup on your web pages. Feeds require that you set up a process to ensure the data is current and valid, and are downloaded periodically.
Since markup and feed data is already present in the Yahoo! system, the display of search results to the user are almost immediate, while custom data services can be slow.
The amount of work required by staff to set up and provide the data sources depends on your available resources. Providing data to Yahoo! as markup requires engineering work on the front-end, while data through feeds and custom data services requires back-end work.
If privacy of your data is a concern, then feeds are preferable; marking up your pages in microformats or RDFa/eRDF makes your data available to anyone on the Internet.
Microformats are the leading established standard for web page markup. RDFa and eRDF are also widely accepted standards. Since these are all open standards, marking up your pages using any of these formats makes your content more easily reusable.
Maintaining the data you provide for SearchMonkey is important to ensure that the data is current and valid. Feeds typically require that you set up a process to send feed updates whenever there is new information available. Markup means that changes to your front end can affect the data Yahoo! gets when it crawls your pages. In the case of custom data services, you must implement them to ensure low latency in the search results.