After gaining a great deal of support from developers, microformats are now finally being adopted by major companies on the Web who are both publishing large databases of content in hCard, hCalendar, and other microformats, and just beginning to index this content for more precise, segmented search results.
Yahoo! Is one of the largest publishers of microformat content, delivering hCalendar and hCard on Upcoming.org over 15 million hCards in Yahoo! Local and hCard, XFN (includes friendships) and the geo (indicates location) microformats on Flickr . Google recently introduced hCard into Google Maps search results (http://googlemapsapi.blogspot.com/ 2007/06/microformats-in–google-maps.html ), making the storage of addresses you’ve found much easier . Publication of content in microformats on a massive scale is great for findability, but more progress is needed still, especially from the major search engines.
Google( http://www.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=29508) and Yahoo! (http://search.yahoo.com/cc ) currently do offer search services that look for content released under Creative Commons licensing using the rel-license microformat, which identities content that can be reused under more open terms and conditions. It’s still just a small step in the grand scheme of things, though. Imagine the power search engines could provide users if they indexed content with an informed algorithm that could tell the difference between an event, contact information , a recipe , a book review , and random text on a page. With microformats search has the potential to return much more precise and meaningful results to users.
As more and more content is published using microformats, search engines will be hard pressed to pass up the opportunity to provide the unprecedented content indexing and search segmentation that microformats can facilitate. Currently, because the major search engines do not integrate microformats provide is not via SEO , but rather in the flexibility offered to users who could move your content to a location where they are sure to find and use it later. When the major search engines do start to introduce microformat searching , which will hopefully be the near future, your content will already be a step ahead of the competition.
Though the big three are currently somewhat passive on the implantation of microformat recognition algorithms into their systems. Technorati is blazing the trail, already introducing a microformat search engine ( http://kitchen.technorati.com/search ) that allows users to find events , contact information, and reviews across the Web that are marked up with microformats. If your content is marked up correctly , you can wait for Technorati’s search spiders to index your content or, better yet, be proactive and submit it yourself at http://pingerati.net . Pingerati.net notifies a number of microformat friendly services like Alexa, Evenful, and the rest of technorati’s services of your content, so a wider audience can index it.
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