Yolink has been around for awhile, as a browser add-on that lets you search better within search results. It mines the hyperlinks of returned results, navigating through the data within those pages and online documents, to bring you right back to the block of text in the content that fits the context of your keyword search.

But that’s not where the action is going to be – an API for search is, it thinks. So this Tuesday sees the formal launch of the Yolink API, which will let others apply its ability to, on the fly, look at content behind links and surface the key information behind keyword searches. The greatest value will be for multi-task, multi-step searches that go beyond the casual user’s quests – research purposes, for example. The decision to go the API route, says Brian Cheek, director of business development at parent company TigerLogic (30 years in the information management trade), took into account the fast-moving conditions around semantic search.

“We are a technology company — we can’t create all the products on top of the data that is available,” he says. “Making the API accessible to the development community lets you build wonderful things on top to take advantage of what is there now, and continue to evolve it over time as more information becomes available.”

Yolink has to its credit patent-pending technology to mine links and pull back actionable blocks of text from a wealth of unstructured and structured data out there on the web – including the ability to launch a preview of where that content is on the page and save, share, and repurpose content across the social media spectrum and append it to Google Docs. So it expects that the growing amount of structured data will make its solution even stronger. It explains that its engine draws on the company’s expertise in XML and large-scale, multidimensional databases, with the core technology looking at the structure behind web pages to reveal their hidden/innate logic and concepts, and then using that information to better understand the content itself on those pages – that is, to imply a certain semantics from the ongoing structure of documents. “As we get access to Open Graph data,” for example, says TigerLink Director, Product Development & Technology, Jeff Dexter, “or even microformats, that will allow us to provide a richer search interface –search price structure, dates, locations – and really empower us as triples of data become available.”

Among the initial apps the company itself built off the web service API is one that sticks Yolink on top of Craigslist, where many Yolink users already use the add-on, and atop Google Patent Search. Sweet Search, a Google custom search engine, has used the widget service to help it mine some 30,000 URLs focused on education content. Yolink is developing widgets for blog tools like WordPress and Typepad so that bloggers can enable searching behind all the links and archives in their web pages.

Opportunities Yolink says are ripe for its technology include delivering content on mobile devices, minimizing link navigation hassles on small screens so that you can get actionable blocks of text right away, and helping companies make searching online customer support facing web sites more efficient – and internal support help, as well.

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