Posts About ‘schema.org’

We’re doing Google’s job for them

Crawling: check. Indexing: check. Ranking: check.

You’ve all heard about the Google +1 button and the recent Schema.org announcement. Big news, both of those, but something is rubbing me the wrong way about all this newfangled stuff Google is pumping out. Namely that Google is getting us to do the hard work for them.

Google, as a search engine, exists to find all the information on the web (crawling), make sense of what it finds (indexing), and serve us with the most relevant content for any given query (ranking). This, in a very simplified nutshell, is Information Retrieval, and it’s what search engines do.

However, it seems search engines are actually quite poor at this. Or at least poor enough that they think they need us – the masses – to do the hard work for them. (more…)

Schema.org – What does it really mean for us

schema-org

Its now been just over a week since the three major search engines announced a unified approach to “create and support a common vocabulary for structured data markup on web pages”. The announcement made almost simultaneously by Google, Bing and Yahoo is in simple language a way of standardising markup – such as microformats – for any party wishing to utilise the schema.org framework. According to the official schema.org site the requirement for a new schema was bourne out of three main issues

  • Webmasters – Schema.org provides a single resource for webmasters to go to rather than the existing fragmented approach.
  • Search Engines – Provides a centralised structured approach required in order to ‘improve search’. In real terms – pages can be interpreted as required with no potential for misintepretaton’
  • Users – With structured data – users will have a better experience from services such as search engines. We have already seen evidence of this via Googles Microformats adoption however further takeup of schemas.org should see this translate across multiple engines. (more…)