We start our discussion on the role of search engines in the Social Web by introducing SearchMonkey, Yahoo!'s Semantic Web application platform. A part of Yahoo!'s Open Search strategy, SearchMonkey allows developers and content owners to exploit structured data to make Yahoo! Search results more useful and visually appealing, and drive more relevant traffic to their sites. SearchMonkey contributes to the transformation from the current web to a Semantic Web by creating an ecosystem of developers, publishers and end-users where all participants benefit from contributing and reusing structured data. We will provide a quick overview of the social data gathered by the Yahoo! crawler and some of the applications built on top of this data. We close with a discussion of the role that (semantic) search engines can and should play in the growing universe of social data exposed in Semantic Web formats.