Google has released the structured data testing tool, a new and renamed version of its rich snippet testing tool. According to a blog by Yong Zhu, on behalf of the rich snippets testing tool team, improvements include:

• How rich snippets are displayed in the testing tool to better match how they appear in search results;
• A new visual design to make it clearer what structured data it can extract from the page, and how that may be shown in search results;
• And the availability of the tool in languages other than English (French, Spanish, Arabic, for example) to help webmasters from around the world build structured-data-enabled websites.

The tool, he writes, works with all supported rich snippets and authorship markup, including applications, products, recipes, reviews, and others. It is located at the same URL as the old testing tool.

An image of what it looks like is below:

So far, the response from around the web seems positive, with comments that confusing and irrelevant error messages are mostly gone, and that it’s a big step up in usability for non-technical users, too. But calls for improvements remain.

For instance, over at SearchEngineLand Vanessa Fox writes that, “looking at the page they show in the blog post: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/banana-banana-bread/, the rich snippet appears in the tool correctly, as you can see in the screenshot above. However, the image is missing for this page in the actual search results. Why isn’t the image showing up?”

Commenting back to the original blog post, there’s also a complaint from one user that he’s very disappointed that “the HTML now only allows 1500 characters max. This makes testing very difficult for large sites with dev servers that are publicly inaccessible. ”