If you've been hanging around the YDN recently, you've probably heard a thing or two about SearchMonkey.

And why not? SearchMonkey is pretty darn cool.

It lets you enhance the appearance of search results for your favorite sites. So the next time you need to look up, say, restaurants, a SearchMonkey app can distill all of the important information, like location, price range, and rating all into one place, right there in your search results.

A ton of people have been tinkering with SearchMonkey since it launched in May. One of the main reasons for this (aside from how cool it is...and never mind the $10,000 contest they held recently), is how easy it is to pick up and start developing with.

In this article, I'll go over XSLT and RDF--two of the fundamental concepts that power SearchMonkey. If you're looking to build your first app or you've built a few and want to get more out of it, you'll definitely want to read on.