Yahoo! Pushes 26.5 Million Microformats Into the Wild
It was just a couple of weeks ago that Yahoo! announced that it would begin indexing semantic markup language such as microformats in its search engine. That's a huge win for the bottom-up approach to building the Semantic Web, and provides an incentive for publishers to start adopting semantic markup like RDF and microformats. As a publisher, Yahoo! is also eating its own dogfood, so to speak, and putting microformats to use on its own sites.
Yesterday, Yahoo! announced that it had begun using microformats on its European shopping search engine Kelkoo. Specifically, Yahoo! Europe pushed out the biggest deployment yet of the draft hListing format, which is a new format used for marking up classifieds listings.
The actual number of hListing's Yahoo! put out there was 26,456,448, as well as an additional 6,500 hCard listings describing merchants. "This bumper injection of structured data into Kelkoo’s pages makes it ripe for re-use, be that browser extensions to draw out product information on our pages, indexing services aggregating product listings together or mashing up the data for reuse in widgets," said developer Ben Ward of Yahoo! Europe.
Ward also indicated that Yahoo! hoped that other sites would adopt the hListing microformat. "After years of waiting for technology to move the web forward, it’s happening. There’s information our there now to pull of functionality we never had before. As web developers, there’s little to do but slip in microformatted mark-up wherever we can, and start having fun in consuming it," he said.
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This will be interesting to watch. One would have expected that hCalendar and hCard would have been the first formats to add since they are more mature and add extra value to data you often search for.
When Yahoo now starts with the draft format hListing you can suspect that their interest is not (just) that of supporting semantics but rather to support their own revenue.
The basic principle for microformats is to only do what is a real need for and to develop the formats slowly with as few additions as possible in the markup. When Yahoo now boosts the use of a draft format, that probably not is mature and ready for release yet, the risk is that the draft will be a de facto standard.
And how short will the time be for the next proposed microformat? 3 months between idea and de facto standard? And what role will internal politics within Yahoo play? You know - marketing vs. development :-)
Big friends might give mighty hugs.
Good move, and a very admirable one.
Now... the question is... how far behind is Google?
Nice to see Yahoo get back into the front seat again.
This will an important milestone in the adoption of Microformats across the whole web.
@#1 - chris Jangelov
The post mentions that Kelkoo uses hCard also to describe merchants. Since the site lists mllions of products, it might have made sense for them to push hListing in a big way.
Bottom-up semantic web is becoming a reality, this is a very exciting year to come...
why would Google use microformats (apart from the ones it has within Blogger)? it's the information kingpin and it has 5000 engineers working on the search engine, so that it can understand all webpages, microformatted or not. In a "top-down" world, few besides Google can create the tools. That's the world it wants to be in.