Microformats and the future of Google (a practical example)

So now that you all know exactly what microformats is (read: Web3.0 (The Semantic Web) building blocks), it is time to look at some of the practical benefits thereof.

Before I start, I should mention that Google is actually a slow adopter of the technology. They probably have good reason for not adopting the technology yet, but if you look at the benefits below, I really hope they change their minds soon! Yahoo! Local support it already, so I’ll play with it and do another post later when time allows for it. (Unfortunately, Yahoo! Local does not include much of Africa…)
So lets take the analogy of the 27dinner with their events published in the hCalendar microformat format. We add a new microformat called hReview which is used by all the Uber Geeks blogging about 27dinners. (From the microformats site: hReview is a simple, open, distributed format,suitable for embedding reviews (of products, services, businesses,events, etc.) in (X)HTML, Atom, RSS, and arbitrary XML. hReview is oneof several microformats open standards.)
Google now indexes the web sites and sees, “w00t! Here is some microformats on this page! Better save it somewhere special…” So it picks out the formatted data and stores it for use in their microformat search engine page. (Lets just make believe that they have a thing called microformats.google.com, since there is not such a thing yet, its only MAKE BELIEVE! Clear? Right!)

So you have heard of this thing called 27dinners and want to know a little more. You go over to microformats.google.com and you enter 27dinner. Instead of returning all other blog’s results with 27dinner in it, it will return only the results formatted. It could return a page with subcategories for formal reviews about the past 27dinners and a subcategory listing future events of the 27dinners. If it really wants to be fancy, Google will allow you to save the future 27dinner events there-and-then to your Google Calendar so you don’t double book for that date and all that without even typing anything but your search words.

In other words, microformats will allow Google to UNDERSTAND that the event details on the page is an EVENT and that REVIEWS on other’s blogs is formal REVIEWS and not random rants of how good or bad the events was or simply someone that said, “Hey, Killroy was here (at the 27dinner)”.

Oh and before I forget, my favorite browser Flock has a cool microformats extension called Flocktails. Go and install Flock then install the extension and check it out!

technorati tags:microformats, web3.0, semanticweb, rdf, google, yahoo, 27dinner

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9 Comments to "Microformats and the future of Google (a practical example)"

• Uno said: On 03/14/2007 at 12:50 pm

  Ek wens het ek meer tyd gehad om hieraan te spandeer… dit lyk ongelooflik interessant.

• Vincent Maher said: On 03/14/2007 at 1:06 pm

  Good post dude, and MF is much more likely to take off in th short term, and much more explainable to idiots or decsion-makers

• Stii said: On 03/14/2007 at 1:49 pm

  ROFL, I guess I’ll never live down this “Good post” thing, eh? I’m just wondering why it does not form a part of ALL new web-based projects? Is it simply being overlooked or do people mot know about it?

  Inderdaad, Uno! Amazing stuff. A typical example of “Beauty in Simplicity”…

• links for 2007-03-15 at Wired Gecko said: On 03/15/2007 at 5:32 am

  [...] Microformats and the future of Google (a practical example) - stii.za.net » Blog Archive » (tags: web3.0 semanticweb microformats google toblog chilipod) [...]

• stii.za.net » Blog Archive » Baking some Web3.0 Cherry Pie said: On 03/15/2007 at 6:28 am

  [...] the review and saves it to their microformat seach engine. Someone goes to microformats.google.com (hypothetical, remember?) search for reviews on condoms for example and picks up the Pronto Condoms reviewed by someone who [...]

• nick said: On 03/17/2007 at 6:34 am

  I like the idea behind microformats, and kidreviewer.com is built with that structure. However, on the flip side Google is serving up great results for reviews, averaging the ratings, etc., but how are they doing it? I don’t see hreview markup in many of the reviews they are gathering.

  Or, to cut to the chase, any idea how a review site would get aggregated by Google? Is it a markup issue? They have my site indexed, yet my reviews are showing up.

  Nick
  http://www.kidreviewer.com

• Standards.za.net » » Semantic Web Search Engine: Kupa said: On 03/19/2007 at 2:45 pm

  [...] Microformats and the future of Google (a practical example) [...]

• Tina helen said: On 08/06/2007 at 11:41 am

  As far as I’ve understood them, microformats are ways of describing your data using regular (X)HTML and CSS class names.

• Size Genetics said: On 06/23/2009 at 1:20 pm

  This is such an information blog i have seen in my whole life, i am seriously inspired by this blog entry and i am glad to post my views there. thanks to webmaster.

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