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Calais Supports Google's Rich Snippets Metadata Harvesting

Submitted by FranSan on Wed, 05/13/2009 - 15:01.
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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

Teaser: 
Google has announced that Rich Snippets will harvest semantic metadata from web pages using Microformats or RDFa.
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Forgive my ignorance in the

Forgive my ignorance in the subject, but are we not already able to feed the search engines our meta data through meta tags? Nevertheless, great to hear that you guys have already started creating a program to deal with this new change that Google is trying to downplay. provillus magic of making up provillus review bowtrol un55b8000 keurig b60 quickbooks pro 2010 garmin 60csx un46b6000 numark ns7 un55b7000


rodbrokert Wed, 11/18/2009 - 16:51

Rich Snippets is a mixed blessing

On the one hand, it makes it easier to organise the internet, but on the other Google is using this information to keep visitors on their properties, rather than send them to the owner's sites.

An opinion piece here:

http://kyrrehaakaas.com/2009/10/im-not-sure-i-like-new-rich-snippets.html

But if you just want to start using them, then here is the Rich Snippets preview tool to check out the code generated by Marmoset:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets


FinnNewb Sat, 10/17/2009 - 20:01

Rich Snippets announcement on Google's Webmaster Central Blog

Here is the link to the official Rich Snippets announcement on Google's Webmaster Central Blog.

-Krista The OpenCalais initiative


KristaThomas Thu, 05/14/2009 - 14:35

Interesting dicsussion of Google's news from Ian Davis of Talis

If you are interested in this development, and want to learn more, you can follow an interesting conversation with Ian Davis of Talis on his Internet Alchemy blog.

-Krista The OpenCalais initiative


KristaThomas Thu, 05/14/2009 - 10:52