It was just a couple of weeks ago that Yahoo! announced that it would begin indexing semantic markup language 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 start adopting semantic markup like RDF and microformats. As a publisher, Yahoo! is also eating its own dogfood, so to speak, 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 biggest deployment yet of the draft hListing format, which is a new format used for marking up classifieds listings.
The actual number of hListing’s 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 Kelkoos pages makes it ripe for re-use, be that browser extensions to draw out product information on our pages, indexing services aggregating product listings together or mashing up the data for reuse 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, its happening. Theres information our there now to pull of functionality we never had before. As web developers, theres little to do but slip in microformatted mark-up wherever we can, and start having fun in consuming it,” he said.
