Google's Semantic Web Push: Rich Snippets Usage Growing
At the Semantic Technology conference in San Francisco today, Google gave an update of its rich snippets initiative - which adds extra information to Google search results. For example, showing restaurant review ratings. It's an experimental Semantic Web feature, but today's update shows that usage is increasing and Google wants to ramp it up significantly.
Rich snippets was announced in May last year and began to be seen in results around October. At the SemTech panel today, Google's Pravir Gupta noted that rich snippets impressions have grown four-fold globally since October 2009, with a two-fold increase on the US/English Web. Rich snippets is available in more than 40 languages.
Gupta told the SemTech audience that there are now more than 50 reviews sites using rich snippets, for example sites that offer restaurant reviews. Also there has been uptake on social networking sites, like Facebook and LinkedIn.
The most common use cases are events (which was added in January) and recipe formats. Google is adding support for more formats, such as video, local businesses and shopping.
Google is using structured data open standards such as microformats and RDFa to power the rich snippets feature. As the below chart shows, microformats is more common than RDFa for this feature.
Google spent a good deal of today's panel continuing its drive to get webmasters to adopt rich snippets. It has a tool called the Rich Snippets Testing Tool, which helps publishers utilize rich snippets.
Finally, Kavi Goel from Google talked about how Google can accelerate growth of the ecosystem, noting that less than 5% of webpages currently have semantic markup. Google wants to see this rise to 50% or more. It is looking for critical mass, which includes adding more formats and encouraging more "beneficial peer pressure" for companies to support rich snippets. Goel cited restaurant review sites as an example - it's not just Yelp which supports it, but other restaurant review services too.
Rich snippets is an example of how the Semantic Web is being adopted by large and powerful Internet companies, so it's encouraging to see that Google is pushing for rapid adoption.
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Are the RDFa stats lower because they are indexing the official Google Rich Snippets vocabularies only? I read that support has been added for FOAF - any others like Good Relations or *cough* SIOC?
Google Snippets are very limited and mainly microformats which is a dead end. Nothing I see here tells me they are advancing snippet support for RDFa.
On the otherhand surprisingly Facebook are extensively supporting RDFa in the OpenGraph Protocol
"We've added the Open Graph Protocol markup to every public Page on Facebook. Check out http://www.facebook.com/Starbucks, http://www.facebook.com/WhiteHouse,
And also listening to the community to make it more standardised
http://groups.google.com/group/opengraphprotocol/browse_thread/thread/cc03368ef0d12c1a
P.S I really hope Twitter annotations support RDFa.
@John: yes, you're right.
@Richard: I guess the Google chaps should catch up on Sindice; here are some other figures:
+ RDFa documents indexed: 25 millions [1]
+ Microformats documents indexed: 20 millions [2]
Cheers,
Michael
[1] http://sindice.com/search?q=format%3ARDFA&qt=term
[2] http://sindice.com/search?q=format%3AMICROFORMAT&qt=term
Posted by: mhausenblas.myopenid.com
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June 25, 2010 2:11 AM
We could add rich snippets to site, but there is no guarantee that Google use it. As a main provider of reviews through aggregation we could produce snippets for any language regarding product reviews.
See that on http://www.peryskop.pl/produkt/808/CANON-PIXMA-MX850 for one product.
Rgs, Jakub
Very interesting
I spoke to several googlers and they are very sceptical aboout Semantic Web initiative. They believe semantic web search will be always inferior to google search.
But Google found how to use Semantic Web in a very limited way - to generate snippets instead of improving search
What's so interesting in this results? Why nobody asked the main question about Google Rich Snippet's implementation : what are the real benefits, i.e. SEO benefits, conversion benefits? In termes of CTR, search engin traffic increase?
Thank u
well mike benefit to seo is secondary aspect google always considered visitors as primary one. Whereas still there are huge number of website who had not implemented this so it needs to create awareness to get atleast 50% positive response. Well google is expert the way google has implemented its comprehensive and universal search is really a cup of tea for google :)
2 Jakub
I used Rich Snippets Testing Tool for http://www.peryskop.pl/produkt/808/CANON-PIXMA-MX850 and Dont see snipet.
Which from big store used product snippets?