Google teams up with Bing and Yahoo for standardised structured data markup

INTERNET SEARCH GIANT Google has teamed up with its rivals Microsoft Bing and Yahoo Search to provide a universal approach to structured data markup for webmasters.

The dynamic trio have put aside their differences to launch schema.org, which isn't where they plot to take over the world but where they share standardised code for showing rich snippets on their search engines. (They're probably still competing vigourously on the world domination thing.)

Rich snippets are like enhanced search results, with capabilities for displaying images, reviews, book details and shedloads of other information in addition to plain text descriptions of web sites. They enable internet search users to more easily find what they're looking for.

The problem for webmasters has been the need to code for several different search engines, which meant using different standards. Using two or more standards at the same time can cause difficulties for the search engines, so many people have opted to code only for Google, since it has been the dominant player.

Now, however, all three of the major search engines support the schema approach, which uses the microdata structured data markup standard. Google previously supported two other standards: microformats and RDFa. It's now concentrating on microdata as the ideal middle-ground between these two extremes, but it has promised to keep supporting the other formats for those who are already using them on their websites.

The schema.org website provides a series of different schemas for different things, such as creative works, people, events, and places. For example, if you have a book you want to flog the web site provides a full list of applicable fields, such as author, publisher, genre, and even awards. For the less web savvy out there, example code is given, comparing both the original html and the page with microdata.

This is extremely user-friendly and makes coding for rich snippets significantly less esoteric. To make things even easier for webmasters, Google has a rich snippets test tool that will show if its search engine can correctly parse the data and display it appropriately. µ