

Google, Bing & Yahoo Unite To Standardize Structured Search Data - pushingbits
http://searchengineland.com/schema-org-google-bing-yahoo-unite-79554

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51Cards
This is somewhat off topic and a completely non-technical response but am I
the only one who gets a small dose of 'warm fuzzies' when large competitors
join forces on something like this? Everything we read is always competition,
lawsuits, accusations... and to me it gets tiring. Occasionally seeing
something like this warms the cockles of my cold jaded IT heart. Nuff said,
let the technical merit debate begin.

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camiller
Forget the technical merit, I want to discuss your point. I'm pretty sure one
of the signs of the apocalypse starts with the phrase "Google, Bing and Yahoo
unite...". When I see that phrase my spidey sense tingles in a decidedly non
'warm fuzzy' fashion! One of the three will probably try to sabotage this.
Likely, one will contribute something to the standard without informing the
others that it is patent encumbered, then submarine them.

Others my feel free to weigh in on my paranoia.

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contextfree
Maybe you'll feel better, and 51Cards will feel worse, if you think of it as
"companies who have invested in search engines unite to give themselves more
competitive advantage over companies who have not invested in search engines,
such as Apple" =)

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doorty
Is anybody seeing how much extra work this is going to put on the front end
developer. We already have to support multiple browsers, multiple display
sizes, ARIA roles, and more. I don't mind the extra work for the handicap
(ARIA), but looking up and adding all this new meta information merely for
search engines is going be a pain. In the end, this extra work makes it easier
for the search engine by requiring the developer to do more work. I would
prefer the reverse, otherwise maybe I need to get into the search business.
They are creating a standard that will make it incredibly easy for future
search engines.

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dhimes
I think that in particular the web page schema should be, at least optionally,
read from the natural html. In other words, you should be able to give

    
    
      <div id="WPFooter">
    

and the search engine should know that this is the footer. In fact, the same
could be asked of the rest of the itemtypes so that we can link them with CSS
and don't have to repeat ourselves.

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brudgers
On one hand I think a common semantic framework is inevitable. On the other it
just looks like the search providers further encouraging the manipulation of
search engine algorithms - another round in the SEO arms race in which
consumer oriented interests are increasingly drowning out non-commercial
speech on the web - e.g. Googling "weather" in the US returns forecasts from
commercial sites but not NOAA's local forcast.

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bergie
Microdata, why? Compared to RDFa (or even Microformats), I don't see a single
compelling reason to use microdata.

At least RDFa has a well documented way to define and extend your own
schemas...

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andymurd
Because most web pages are not valid HTML, let alone valid XHTML and you
really need XHTML to make the most of those schemas. In other words "RDFa is
hard, let's use Wordpress".

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equark
So far the schema listed don't look very subtle. Extracting this type of
information from unstructured text should really be something that machine
learning algorithms can do pretty well.

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andrenotgiant
I am curious: Given all of the trouble with scraped content on the web, why
would data publishers want to make their data _more_ machine-readable?

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wccrawford
Given all what trouble? You mean those few print publishers who don't
understand the internet and are very vocal about it?

There has been very little actual trouble. Most business roll with new
technology and use it to get an edge on their competitors that don't get it.

You've been listening to people who refuse to innovate and thinking they are
the majority, or somehow a backbone of our society. They aren't either.

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rbarooah
Maybe there is a refusal to innovate, but maybe we now have a structural
problem wherein we simply don't need as many people to work on these things as
a result of automation, and even information work jobs are going to diminish.

How do you tell these two scenarios apart?

