Introducing a new Rich Snippets format: Events Webmaster Level: All Last year we introduced Rich Snippets, a new feature that makes it possible to surface structured data from your pages on Google's search results. So far, user reaction to Rich Snippets has been enthusiastic -- after all, Rich Snippets help people make more informed clicks and find what they need even faster. We originally introduced Rich Snippets with two formats: reviews and people. Later in the year we added support for marking up video information which is used to improve Video Search. Events markup is based off of the hCalendar microformat. The new format shows links to specific events on the page along with dates and locations. If you have event listings on your site, we encourage you to review the events documentation we've prepared to help you get started. Stay tuned for more developments in Rich Snippets throughout the year! Written by Mike Danylchuk and Nitin Shetti
Snipplr - Code 2.0 Better recipes on the web: Introducing recipe rich snippets Webmaster Level: All Anticipating the start of the season of barbecues and potlucks, we’ve added recipes as our newest rich snippets format. This means that for certain sites with recipe content, Google users will see quick facts when these recipe pages show up as part of the search results. For example, if you were searching for an easy to make thai mango salad, you can now see user ratings, preparation time, and a picture of the dish directly in search result snippets. Recipes is the fifth format we support, following the introduction of reviews, people, video and, most recently, events. If you have recipe content on your site, you can get started now by marking up your recipes with microdata, RDFa, or the hRecipe microformat. Please remember that to ensure a great user experience we’re taking a gradual approach to surface rich snippets. Written by Jun Gong, Kosuke Suzuki, and Yu Watanabe
Enabling Rich Snippets in Custom Search Posted by: Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager and Nicholas Weininger, Software Engineer Today, we announced Rich Snippets for Google web search, a new presentation of snippets that highlight structured data embedded in webpages. Rich Snippets provide summary information, including important page-specific attributes, to help you quickly identify the relevance of your results. Experiments on Google have shown that people find this additional data valuable -- if they see useful and relevant information from a webpage, they are more likely to click through to it. Our web search team is currently experimenting with a limited set of attributes for reviews and user profiles that webmasters can provide through in-line markup in their webpages by using open standards such as microformats or RDFa. Since Custom Search sits on top of the Google web search platform, we're enabling Rich Snippets for custom search engines too. <! Let us know if you have feedback about custom Rich Snippets.
RDFa Primer We begin the introduction to RDFa by using a subset of all the possibilities called RDFa Lite 1.1 [rdfa-lite]. The goal, when defining that subset, was to define a set of possibilities that can be applied to most simple to moderate structured data markup tasks, without burdening the authors with additional complexities. Many Web authors will not need to use more than this minimal subset. 2.1.1 The First Steps: Adding Machine-Readable Hints to Web Pages Consider Alice, a blogger who publishes a mix of professional and personal articles at We will construct markup examples to illustrate how Alice can use RDFa. 2.1.1.1 Hints on Social Networking Sites Alice publishes a blog and would like to provide extra structural information on her pages like the publication date or the title. Example 1 <html><head> ... This information is, however, aimed at humans only; computers need some sophisticated methods to extract it. Example 2 <html><head> ... Example 3 Example 4 Example 5