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Yahoo! publishes 26.5 million Microformats

Posted by James | Filed under Geek, Semantic, Web

Just a couple of weeks ago Yahoo! announced that it would start to index semantic markup languages such as microformats in its search engine. That’s a huge win for the bottom-up approach to building the Semantic Web, and provides an incentive for publishers to adopt semantic markup like RDF and microformats. As a publisher, Yahoo! is also eating its own dogfood, and putting microformats to use on its own sites.

Yesterday, Yahoo! announced that it had begun using microformats on its European shopping search engine Kelkoo. Specifically, Yahoo! Europe pushed out the largest yet deployment of the draft hListing format, which is a new format used for marking up classified listings.

The actual number of hListings Yahoo! put out there was 26,456,448, as well as an additional 6,500 hCard listings describing merchants. "This bumper injection of structured data into Kelkoo’s pages makes it ripe for re-use, be that browser extensions to draw out product information on our pages, indexing services aggregating product listing together or mashing up the data for re-use in widgets," said developer Ben Ward of Yahoo! Europe.

Ward also indicated that Yahoo! hoped that other sites would adopt the hListing microformat. "After years of waiting for technology to move the web forward, it’s happening. There’s information out there now to pull off functionality we never had before. As web developers, there’s little to do but slip in microformatted mark-up wherever we can, and start having fun in consuming it," he said.

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