The Semantic Web by way of Rich Snippets

Johannes Beus
A few weeks ago, Google introduced a few innovations and perspectives on the future development of their searchengine at the „Searchology Event“. To me, there is one application that, at first glance, has been overshadowed by the more intuitive implementions such as the wonder wheel, even though, in my eyes, it's the most important development: “Rich Snippets” is what Google calls this opportunity to mark certain informations in the websites source code in a bid to highlight the normal Snippets, which have lost a lot of attention since the blanket introduction of Universal Search. We can see this nicely in the entry for the badly made Qype-clone Yelp.com:

Rich Snippets am Beispiel von Yelp.com

Aside from the usual information such as the Title, the URL and a text-snippet, we are also shown the average review-rating and a general price range. It should come as no surprise, when Google says, that these results have a much higher clickrate than “normal” results. At the moment, you have to be on a Whitelist to benefit from these additional clicks (which will probably either fade out in a while or get major, automatic expansions) and, which makes this the exciting part, the data in the source code has to be marked in a way, that the computer can understand it.

While up until now, the main hindrance in the advancement of the semantic web was the problem, that computers were not able to understand the content of most sites and put them in relation to each other, which will now change. For the first time, large parts of the (commercial) Internet have an interest in marking their content accordingly and I am sure that, a short time after a widespread introduction through Google, we will get a whole lot of other, far better usages of the data at hand.
Johannes Beus - on Mon (05/25/2009) at 18:42 PM

Add Comment

more
This posting is older than 30 days and therefore closed for new comments.