San Francisco — While Google competes with Microsoft and Yahoo in the search market, the trio in a rare display of alliance, the search engine giant over the weekend announced a new initiative with its arch rivals Microsoft and Yahoo have launched a site dubbed as Schema. org, to create and support common ways to represent web page metadata.
The Internet rivals initiative is to promote a common format to “markup” Web pages with data detailing for search engines exactly what sites contain. The project will empower web publishers the tools to make their web content more easily understood by search engines and more effectively represented on search results pages.
“With Schema.org, site owners can enhance how their sites appear in search results not only on Google, but on Bing, Yahoo, and potentially other search engines as well in the future,” said Google Fellow Ramanathan Guha in a blog post.
However, a number of options are available to website makers when it comes to marking up pages, and the search engines considers a common standard will mean minimal amount of work for publishers and more accuracy in ranking results.
“We know that it takes time and effort for webmasters to add this markup to their pages, and including markup is much harder if every search engine asks for data in a different way.” “We want to pursue making the open Web richer and more productive,” Guha said in a blog post.
Schema, is designed to foster a standard vocabulary for data markup on web pages. By advocating the use of these common tags across the Web, Yahoo, Microsoft and Google expect that their search engines will be better able to identify, crawl and index structured data.
The Schema project has already created more than 100 different HTML tags for structured data categories like events, organizations, people, places, products, reviews, ratings, movies and books, which empowers website administrators to tag data according to a given category.
For example, the Person schema presents a way to connect a person’s name with data that relates to that person, like his or her street address and email address. Without the structure provided by metadata markup, it can be difficult for search engines to be sure that a name on a web page is associated with some other data attribute.
“We want to enable publishers to give us indication about what things they are describing on their sites,” the Microsoft Bing team wrote in a blog post on Thursday. “Rather than rely solely on machine learning and other [artificial-intelligence] techniques, we asked, ‘what if we could enable publishers to have a single schema they could use to describe their sites that all search engines could understand?’
“We at Bing perceive this as a major step forward for the Web, simplification for webmasters and richer more informative search results for consumers.” “We want to be able to model the world in which we all live to the level that search can actually help you make decisions and get things done in real life by understanding all the options the world presents,” Bing added.
“Many applications, especially search engines, can greatly reap benefit from direct access to this structured data. On-page markup enables search engines to understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results,” reads a message in Schema.org’s home page.
“With Schema.org, site owners can embellish how their sites appear in search results not only on Google, but on Bing, Yahoo and potentially other search engines as well in the future,” Google wrote in a blog post.