SemTech2009 impressions « Ivan’s private site

But, as a last minute addition to the program, the organizers succeeded in getting Othar Hansson and Kavi Goel to talk about Google’s rich sniplets. I have already blogged on this a few weeks ago but this presentation made the goal of the project way more understandable. Essentially, by recognizing specific microformat or RDFa vocabularies,

they can improve the user experience by adding extra information on the search result. It is interesting to observe the difference between Yahoo! and Google in this respect: both of them use microformats/RDFa for the same general goal but, whereas Yahoo! relies on the community providing applications and on users personalizing their own search result page, Google controls the output in a generic way that does not require further user actions. It will be interesting to see how these differences influence people’s usage patterns. There were some discussion on the Google’s choice on vocabularies; the presenters made it quite clear that they are perfectly happy using other vocabularies (eg, vCard or FOAF) if they become pervasive, and this is a discussion that Google plans to engage with the community. There is of course a chicken-and-egg issue there (if a vocabulary is known by Google, then it will be more widely used, too), and this is cleary an area to discuss further. But these are details. The very fact that both Yahoo! and Google look at microformats and RDFa is what counts! Who would have thought just about a year ago

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