The Year Of Microformats - Yahoo! To Search The Semantic Web

Posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008

Yahoo! announced today that Yahoo! Search is to support semantic web standards to enhance their search. This is fantastic news for anyone interested in semantic technologies as well as the general public. Why? Because Yahoo! Search is big enough to be the tipping point, the breakthrough point for semantics on the web.

The Problems That Previously Faced Semantic Technology

The Microformats Symbol

There are a number of ways of implementing semantics on a web site, from the original methods defined by the W3C using RDF and OWL to microformats, built on (X)HTML, technology we already have and use. The issue is that there seems no real reason for anyone to use these standards; sure, marking up content so that machines can understand it is all very well, but what’s the use if there are no machines reading it?

Up until today only a few technologies supported certain standards, the Operator extension for Firefox supports microformats, as will Firefox 3 when it is released, but none of these are big enough or important enough for the mainstream. Adding semantics to a website is a lot of hard work if no-one is around to use it.

Time For The Big Guns

This is why Yahoo!’s announcement is so big. Now there are machines reading that data and using it and enriching the web with it, do you, as a developer or site owner, want to miss out on that? Yahoo!’s search is to use microformats initially, to improve their understanding of the data to return more relevant results (and, from the looks of their example with LinkedIn add more detail to their search results). So, will other search engines, I’m looking at Google and Microsoft here, want to miss out on the wealth of data that they aren’t collecting and Yahoo! is?

Now it will be beneficial for developers to include microformats and other semantic data as Yahoo! is reading and using it. It will be beneficial for other search engines to get in on the act, as they don’t want to lose market share to a more relevant Yahoo!. Furthermore, it will then be even more beneficial for developers to include the information as everyone watches what Google is doing! Then, with the wealth of semantic data going around, startups and other small web companies will be able to leverage the data for their own uses producing a whole new wave of technologies: web 3.0 anybody?

The Semantic Web Is Coming And Everyone Wins

What could be better, a reason to include semantic technologies in your site, better search results, new, intelligent services? I can only say thank you to Yahoo! for supporting this and giving it the much needed boost.

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Comments

  1. 1March 14th, 2008 at 2:19 am

    Tim Says:

    Microformats are great! Google’s actually been using them for a while now with the “rel” and “rev” attributes. Mainly with “nofollow”, “vote-for”,”vote-against”, and “vote-abstain”. IE8, Firefox extension “Tails Export”, iCal and some social networking sites like Pownce support them too. Creative commons uses the rel-license, and there’s an emerging format called “hResume” that’s pretty interesting. Using microformats with the CSS attribute selectors can add a lot to the user experience even if it’s only a rel=”external” to show an external link. John Allsopp wrote a great book about this, definitely worth reading.


  2. 2March 14th, 2008 at 8:58 am

    Phil Says:

    Hi Tim,

    I really think microformats are great too, in fact I am redesigning this blog from scratch again and I was already considering which microformats I can slip in (hAtom and hCard so far). Now I, and everyone else, has even more reason to include them and that’s what I’m excited about.

    I’m not sure you’re entirely correct on the services which do consume microformats already. Google and other search engines understand rel=”nofollow”, but I didn’t think “vote-for” etc were ever introduced, they were suggestions to replace “nofollow” due to its controversy as a microformat. Also, IE8 will be supporting Web Slices which are based on the hAtom specification, but not exactly. I will be looking into implementing both at the same time if possible.

    It’s just great that Yahoo! have given everyone a good reason to use these microformats now and in the future even more descriptitve semantic technologies.


  3. 3March 14th, 2008 at 11:39 am

    Tim Says:

    Google started support for hcard (in maps) and hatom (in blogger) in aug 2007:
    http://googlesystem.blogspot.c.....hcard.html

    and

    http://epeus.blogspot.com/2007.....pport.html

    good sitepoint article too:
    http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs.....y-arrived/


  4. 4March 14th, 2008 at 7:43 pm

    Phil Says:

    Ah, I see, Google produce microformats with Blogger and Maps.

    My point is that now Yahoo! will be using the microformats there is a reason to produce them for every developer. Before, the few programs that did use microformats were just too niche to be worthwhile, but when a market leader (or at least second place in search!) decides to use them then there becomes a marketable reason to make them available on your site.

    The same thing is happening with OpenID at the moment, Yahoo! acounts and Blogger accounts can be used as OpenID accounts, but neither accept sign ups with OpenID accounts outside of their system. Once a big player starts to accept OpenID sign ups with accounts outside of their user account system then OpenID will become huge as well.

    For now, I’ll be watching microformats and implementing them here too. I’ll be interested to see the growth, the benefits and the response to this throughout the web.


  5. 5March 13th, 2009 at 6:58 am

    Breitling Says:

    What is the main cause of using microformats. If Google was using it in past so y now Yahoo want to use it:?


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