Google announced today support for enhanced markup for video search. This will allow webmasters to include important information, such as titles and descriptions, in machine-readable HTML along with the JavaScript or Flash videos themselves.
In a blog post, video search project manager Michael Cohen wrote, “We wanted to offer webmasters an additional tool, so today we’re taking a page from the rich snippets playbook and announcing support for Facebook Share and Yahoo! SearchMonkey RDFa.”
Google’s “rich snippets,” as we previously reported, use structured data open standards such as microformats and RDFa to give users more detailed previews of the information contained on a web page.
Both the Facebook Share and RFDa markup formats will enable webmasters to give Google – and video-searching users – vital details, including video titles and descriptions. Like other semantic web technologies, these details allow our search engines to become smarter, our results richer and more relevant. And by allowing webmasters to specify the content type as video content, users’ searches for video will yield more results with greater relevancy.
“While we’ve become smarter at discovering this information on our own,” Cohen writes, “we’d certainly appreciate some hints directly from webmasters.”
Yahoo! SearchMonkey, a semantic search technology which we’ve covered extensively in the past, gives webmasters the opportunity to create descriptions about content – in this case, online video. With these machine-readable descriptions, the search engine extracts structured data about videos and renders that data as enhanced search results.
The Facebook Share markup format also allows for the inclusion of metadata with video content.
