March 17th, 2008 by James Omdahl
Last week Yahoo! announced that they would be opening up their search platform in something they were calling the Yahoo! Search Open Ecosystem. I held off on writing anything about this initiative because, well, I really didn’t get it. But after reading some stuff online, I am still totally confused.
My basic understanding is that Yahoo! will allow webmasters to add certain tags (or microformats) to their sites that will help Yahoo! better understand the pages and the relationship between the different pages. Then Yahoo! will use this data to create better web results, since they won’t have to try to figure out the relationships between sites/pages/etc. through linking patterns and content exclusively.
The example given in the Yahoo! announcement has to do with LinkedIn, and says that by marking up its pages with these microformats, Yahoo! could better “understand the semantic content and relationships of the many components of the site.”
So that’s what I understand, but here are the things that are confusing me:
- Are these “microformats” any different from much abused meta tags of days past? Won’t giving webmasters control over these factors just encourage them to take advantage of the system to increase their search rankings?
- How technical must one be to put these microformats into place? Does this mean reworking an entire site to comply with the microformat standards? If so, could the changes being made hurt rankings in Google?
- Is this really a big deal at this point, or is it just a small step towards something that will be bigger later on?
If you can answer these questions, you’d be my hero. I really want to understand this stuff, but things seem to get way technical and over my head when I do any digging.
Thanks!
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March 18th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
Microformats are basically tagging your content through a series of additional attributes or tags put into the HTML of an existing site. So, instead of just using the attributes to turn the font red, youll use them to tell machines the structure of the content. A good example is the hCard, which is a microformat representation of a vCard. Using span tags and the class attribute, you basically create a machine-parsable format thats used for contact info representation like a vCard. More info can be found at the Microformats web site.
As to the other side, yes, these can be abused… and probably will be. Not sure what Yahoos thinking from that side of things, but the Semantic Web is a great opportunity to add some structure to whats sometimes a very hard thing to parse for a machine. Itd be really sad if all that happened was “marketers” using this as a weak point to game the system.
March 18th, 2008 at 8:47 pm
Oh… and to add a bit more. Its not hard at all to add microformats to an existing site and Google really shouldnt care about them. Theyre pretty unobtrusive and the GOOG will prolly just ignore them like they do most HTML tags now.
And its most definitely something that will (hopefully) be bigger in the future. Theres a lot of opportunity out there for mashing up web sites when you dont have to do screen scraping to get info off of a site.
March 19th, 2008 at 9:44 am
I knew I could count on you to explain all that Justin. Its much clearer now to me.
Itll be interesting to see if people will start adopting microformats in the near future or if it will take the GOOG to make people take notice.
Thanks!