Technorati microformats search

Category: Search engine

Topic: microformats

Year created: 2006

Overall rating: 4 out of 5

Content rating: 3 out of 5

Design rating: 4 out of 5

Navigation rating: 4 out of 5

I was supposed to attend a microformats dinner tonight in SF but was stymied by the impossibility of parking a car anywhere in that city. I returned to my hotel to catch up on the latest blogs to find a post from Tantek from Technorati announcing the launch of their microformats search. So it turns out I was lucky I didn’t get to the meal where I intended to spend the evening lamenting the lack of decent microformat consumption apps (as opposed to generation apps of which there is an ever growning number).

If you generate microcontent and are pinging technorati already then your microformatted content automatically becomes searchable using the new tool. The implementation is from the Google bare bones school of search and is currently very speedy. This review is being done using the SB plug-in on Wordpress, will be output as hReview content and should therefore appear if you search for it using their search engine.

They can handle hCard contact details, hReview reviews and hCalendar events. I tried a few different terms and I found hits for upcoming.org and expotv.com and Yahoo Tech (Tantek gives the full list).

This may finally be the key to enabling microformats to go tech-mainstream. There is now a good reason to structure your content - it will get picked up automatically in an intelligent fashion by the new search engine.

Even if it does no more than searching across all event sites and public calendars which are published as hCalendar, it will be an extremely useful tool.

It’ll be interesting to see if they keep the current simple free-text search box or if they add some boolean capabilities on the various microformats fields e.g. find events in Cork on June 8th not organized by Tim O’Reilly ;-)

I’m thrilled that Technorati have finally lauched this. As the main promoters of microformats, it is in their interest to have one of the first compelling applications. But I do hope they give it its own site soon and do a big media splash about it.

[tags]Technorati, microformats, microformats search, hReview, hCard, hCalendar, Tantek[/tags]