Gregg Turner of Blue Claw Search recently discussed the impact of RDFa format data and why developers should implement it. Turner writes, “Rich snippets have become a lot more prominent within the SERPS over the past couple of years, with appealing, feature-rich listings becoming a more and more commonplace. Google refers to these enhanced search listings as “Rich Snippets”, and from a search marketing perspective they are often more appealing to users and increase Click Through Rates (CTR).” Read more

The Twittersphere is buzzing about the Semantic Web at last grabbing onto the hearts and minds of the whole web community. It started off with a tweet from Juan Sequeda – a contributor to The Semantic Web Blog and a well-known figure in our area – that reads:

A follow-up message explains:

Follow that link and you’ll find yourself at a Bing webmaster help site that indicates Microsoft wants to play nice with whatever markup approach webmasters want to implement – microdata, microformats, or RDFa. The site mark-up overview on the page referenced says that Bing’s “crawlers do not prefer one specification over another. It’s entirely up to you to decide which of the supported specifications best fits your data.”

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SemTech 2011 Coverage

Barbara H. Starr

In Barbara Starr’s (Ontologica) session this week at Semtech 2011, San Francisco, she presented a detailed timeline outlining the adoption of RDFa and semantic search enhancements by the major search engines.  In addition to mentioning the rapid growth of the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud, she showed a movement by the search engines, in particular Google, to support semantic search. The movement is going away from a web of documents with hyperlinks to a web of data and semantic links. Her timeline showed the evolution from search engine support for structured data formats such as Resource Description Framework-in-attributes (RDFa) through last week’s announcement of the Schema.org alliance.

In her talk, she demonstrated how the use of semantic technology in commercial searches can be accomplished by doing a query for “Barack Obama Birthday” on both Google and Bing.  Google returns answers from typical sources like answers.com and Wikipedia, as shown below in Fig. 1.0.

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On Tuesday Google announced, “Today we’re beginning to support authorship markup—a way to connect authors with their content on the web. We’re experimenting with using this data to help people find content from great authors in our search results. We now support markup that enables websites to publicly link within their site from content to author pages. For example, if an author at The New York Times has written dozens of articles, using this markup, the webmaster can connect these articles with a New York Times author page. An author page describes and identifies the author, and can include things like the author’s bio, photo, articles and other links.” Read more

[Revised and re-posted at 4:03pm EST]

In a collaborative effort reminiscent of sitemaps.org, Google, Yahoo! and Bing have announced the launch of schema.org.  Perhaps the most significant aspect of this announcement is the particular standard they have focused on: namely, microdata.

In the Google announcement, Kavi Goel and Pravir Gupta of Google’s search team say, “Historically, we’ve supported three different standards for structured data markup: microdata, microformats, and RDFa. We’ve decided to focus on just one format for schema.org to create a simpler story for webmasters and to improve consistency across search engines relying on the data.”

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