Interesting news yesterday from Google. Basically they’ve announced that their new Rich Snippets feature will harvest semantic metadata from web pages using Microformats or RDFa.

As is to be expected – Google is a little uncommunicative about whether they’ll harvest this from every web page that has it and exactly how they’ll use this information in displaying search results (or advertising) – it’s still an important development. It’s important because – if they do something interesting with the content – it will provide the incentive for several million websites to begin embedding semantic metadata – which we think is a good thing.

Some time ago OpenCalais released Marmoset – a tool designed to provide automated microformat generation for the Yahoo crawler. Marmoset sits quietly and waits for Yahoo to come along. When the crawler arrives Marmoset tags the page using OpenCalais and inserts microformats at the end of the page for a subset of the detected entities. It’s not a perfect solution – the microformats should really be implemented in-line with the content – but it does serve the purpose of feeding Yahoo the metadata at no additional coding cost to the content publisher.

Today we’re releasing an updated Marmoset that does the same thing for Google’s Rich Snippets. The tool and documentation are located here.

In the future we’ll look at more elegant solutions that embed RDFa directly in-line with the content. For the time being, Marmoset is a no-cost mechanism for jumping on the Google Rich Snippets platform.

Tom