There’s not much love lost between Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Although the latter pair are involved in a strategic partnership, Google unseated Yahoo as top of the search hill many years ago, and Microsoft were recently accused of poaching Google’s search results.
Despite their differences, they do have one thing in common – the desire to be able to crawl your data and make it as easily searchable as possible. To this end, the nerdiest ménage à trois in history has been formed under the banner of Schema.org, designed to standardise microdata. Microdata is essentially a set of tags that can be applied to information on a website to let a search engine know what kind of data it is.
For example, if you wanted to correctly mark-up your company’s details, you would give your company address the appropriate “address” tags, your phone number a “phone number” tag, etc. All of this data together would make your company easier to list on services like directories or Google / Bing Maps.
Google, Bing and Yahoo have all published blog posts showing how they can behave like adults when it is mutually beneficial. Bing talk about the “Web of Objects” in their post, which refers to how to usage of the Schema markups with create an “object” layer atop the regular World Wide Web of pages and text. These objects can be picked up by websites and apps and manipulated as separate entities from the sites they exist on. This is a similar idea to the “Internet of Things”, which refers to the increasing connectivity of physical dumb devices such as security cameras and refrigerators, and how they form a secondary network to the visual Internet most of us are used to.
Although their motives are clearly self-serving, this cooperation between organisations should be applauded, especially between companies so often at one another’s throats.
Of course there will still be fierce competition between Google and Microsoft’s Bing – once the raw data is there it’s still up to the individual search engines to decide how they process and display that data.
