That was a pretty big announcement in its own right, and I was very pleased to see the new pattern approved and garnering a bit of buzz. That announcement, however, was trumped by Google announcing that they will be starting to index Microformats and RDFa and using that data to enrich their search results.

Microformats has been around since 2003, but the adoption has been a bit sluggish. While overall quite easy to implement, it can been difficult to demonstrate the value of using Microformats at times due to a lack of major support, and therefore, major incentive. That shouldn’t be a problem anymore, because Google is definitely providing that major incentive.

How They’ll Be Used

Google has a good vision for how to make use of the harvested data in their results. They’ll be providing these “rich snippets”, as they’re calling them, to provide both additional content and meaning about the pages in their search results. For example, a page featuring reviews will feature the average star rating, and number of reviews the page contains, right there in the search results.

In addition to reviews, this initial launch will also provide “rich snippets” for people. Using contact information parsed from sites like LinkedIn, for example, search results may indicate a person’s job title and location, to help users determine if the results they are looking at are likely to be associated with the person they’re looking for.

On top of that, Google plans for to use these Microformats to allow users to be a bit more specific with their searches. An example given was that a user could search for all reviews on a printer where the average rating was over 3 stars. This allows users to tailor the content they receive by the context in which they are interested.

Not only does this new feature enhance the user experience, but the use of Microformats and RDFa data should also provide signifcant value for sites smart enough to markup their content using them. According to studies done by Yahoo on similar enhancements to search results, they found these kinds of improvements resulted in a significant improvement in click-through rates, in some cases up to a 15% increase.

More Coverage

There’s been lots of great coverage on Google’s announcement, and I highly encourage you to have a look at some of the insights offered in the posts below:

• Introducing Rich Snippets
• Google Announces Support for Microformats and RDFa
• Google Engineering Explains Microformat Support in Searches (Interview)
• Google Search Now Supports Microformats and Adds “Rich Snippets” to Search Results

In addition, if you haven’t explored Microformats, I encourage you to do so now. With Google starting to index Microformats, and in turn leverage the harvested data to enhance search results, whether or not Microformats are valuable is no longer debatable.

Oomph, much like Operator in Firefox, pulls microformatted information from a page and allows the user to make use of this data by offering options like being able to export contact information, map addresses, and add events to your calendar.

That would be enough in itself to get my attention…Microsoft has not typically been the most open of companies, and despite Gates’ declaration that the web needs Microformats, they really hadn’t done much to advance its’ use. Seeing their developer community get behind Microformats with the toolbar and a couple of nice Microformats articles is very encouraging.

However, there’s more to this story. In addition to the IE toolbar, a cross-browser Javascript implementation of Oomph was created. The toolkit, which makes use of JQuery, provides the same functionality of Oomph no matter the browser being utilized.

What’s so wonderful about the way the Oomph toolkit functions is that the useful data is all right there in the browser window. Without the visitor leaving the site, they can grab a vcard of your contact information, see a listing of upcoming events, or make use of Visual Earth and view a map of a location.

This is, I think, a fairly major move. The beauty of Microformats is how easy it is to make your content more meaningful, and more useful. By providing similar data in a specific format, it significantly decreases the effort necessary to extract that data, and then use it. Having a cross-browser implementation of a script that makes use of this data to enhance its’ functionality is really a nice feature and a great way to show off the value of using Microformats.

What’s best is that since the toolkit makes use of Javascript and CSS for the effects and layout, we can modify the functionality and appearance for usage on our own sites. Technorati already offered services to help us extract contact information or event information, but the Oomph toolkit expands upon that functionality and allows us to offer even more enhanced options for visitors.

All in all, I am very pleased by this development. Microformats is such a valuable technology that is long overdue for mainstream implementation. It’s nice to see yet another big supporter coming through to help it get there. Along with Technorati’s tools and the fantastic Optimus Microformats transformer by Dmitry Baranovskiy, the resouces are in place and it should be interesting to see the ways these tools are utilized to provide a better user experience for visitors.