Over the years, the web has been immensely revolutionized, with a lot of rich content, browsers that are capable of displaying rich media, technologies such as AIR effectively taking and web app seamlessly to the desktop, data mining and data exchange taking place across domains in a second, and a host of other things.
While web designers, developers, bloggers, et all do stress a lot on usability, still majority of the work is done for the humans – people who can use their eyes and make sense of the data. For search engine crawlers/bots, making sense of data still remains an uphill task, and not everyone is interested in utilizing the power of search engines effectively. Or to state in different words, nobody cares as to what the search engine bot makes out of the data; it is Google’s, Yahoo’s, et all’s problems to make sense of the data. So, we feel good when google starts indexing Flash content, and are happy with the google webmaster tools for our website (no doubt it gives any site a relatively better SE ranking in a couple of months)
But, there is this small little thing called Semantic Web – which although most of the people know about, unfortunately nobody is interested in implementing or coming to standards with it. For bloggers, there is something called Structured Blogging which obviously seems to have got extinct these days with the fact that there are not many people ready to get along easily. Then there is Microformats which helps you semantically mark up data on your website. There are tons of other formats that are used to mark up your data in a way that makes sense of it to the search engine bots. But, still these technologies are not mainstream. Maybe now that yahoo has started the open search initiative, we might find smarter developers devoting some time to semantic web, the search engines, and making sense of their data to crawlers.
And as for the benefits – just read through this post on Yahoo search blog, regarding the goods. There are tons to be benefited from. And do not forget to check out the live examples – especially the LinkedIn example :)
