Yahoo is making some noise at the current SMX West conference in Santa Clara. They have officially launched Yahoo! Buzz, a Digg style social news site and at the same time are unveiling a project code-named "Search Monkey" which consists of a set of open-source tools that allow users and publishers to annotate and enhance search results associated with specific web sites.

Yahoo! Buzz is a Digg-like site that takes stories from pre-approved news publishers and let’s users vote on stories, pushing them up to the top of the page. The more users that vote for a story, via the embedded button or on the Buzz site, the higher the story goes on Buzz. But user voting isn’t the only factor in how well stories do. Yahoo is also looking at their search engine logs in real time to determine hot or breaking news. Stories on that topic will get an extra boost in the rankings. More details available at TechCrunch.

Yahoo is also opening up their search platform which will allows 3rd parties to build and present the next generation of search results. Site owners will be able to provide all types of additional information about their site directly to Yahoo! Search. So instead of a simple title, abstract and URL, for the first time users will see rich results that incorporate the massive amount of data buried in websites -- ratings and reviews, images, deep links, and all kinds of other useful data -- directly on the Yahoo! Search results page. More details on the Yahoo Search Blog as well as Chris Sherman's coverage of it at Search Engine Land.