Alla Gringaus

Google’s Metaweb – Smartest Data Organization

Metaweb, a formerly San Francisco startup, now Google’s company (2010) helps smartest search engine to find and distinguish different words that may have different values like Paris may be Paris France or Paris Hilton. The complicated mechanics of metaweb uses semantic relationships between people and things from around the web, including websites, ebooks, information about movies, and businesses – all combined in open Freebase database maintained by Google. In other words, Metaweb maintains Freebase.

via Freebase.com – Metaweb (the company) has developed Metaweb (the database and API). Freebase (the open global structured knowledge base) is a high-profile public instantiation of the Metaweb technology. This manual documents general Metaweb services and APIs, and relies on Freebase for example data and applications. The services and APIs are applicable beyond Freebase, however, and you’ll find that this manual uses the name “Metaweb” far more than it does the name “Freebase”.

Favorite recipe, better view. I love Google.

Google with Recipe View helps you find recipes from across the web but now Google narrows down your search to view only recipes.

The Evolution of hRecipe Microformat

Google – It’s Official – Rich Snippet Search is here

Introducing Recipe View, based on Rich Snippets markup: Today, we’re happy to introduce Recipe View, a new way of finding recipes when searching on Google. Recipe View enables you to filter your regular web search results to show only recipes and to restrict results based on ingredients, cook time, or calorie preferences…

AllRecipes.com, Food Network, Epicurious and BettyCrocker.com content have all already benefited from the initial proposal and are displayed in search results presented as rich snippets. Other popular recipe sites and food networks can have this technique implemented pretty fast, which just requires the front-end developer follow coding instructions to have the content be indexed appropriately by Google and Bing and quickly findable in search results – better User Experience, optimized SEO, increased pageviews, not sure about ad impressions though.

For now, it’s very exciting seeing it in action:

How it all started: 2000 – RecipeML

The RML, Recipe Markup Language, existed from 20th century, literally, 2000, and created by company FormatData. The specification was written in the way that defined the Recipe Markup Language (RecipeML), a means to represent food preparation recipes in the Extensible Markup Language (XML).

What did it mean?

It meant that with the help of XML a Recipe Markup Language was created that described the content of the document – recipes. That was pretty straightforward: following instructions, the content authors would create recipe files in the RecipeML format, web developers would post them on a website,  server-side folks would create the applications that would be able to read those files, and the users were using the recipes!

How was the document structured in RecipeML?

Just like any XML documents, the files had Structure elements like recipe, Head elements like preptime, Equipment elements like equipment, Ingredient elements like ingredients, Nutrition elements like nutrients. In other words, it was an  XML-based format for marking up recipes!

Markup Recipe Development Process

You can track the process of Markup Recipe on Microformat blog.

• recipe-examples
• recipe-formats
• recipe-brainstorming
• recipe-brainstorming-archive
• recipe-issues

Microformat hRecipe

The result of the effort above was the microformat hRecipe, which is still draft.

• hRecipe
• hRecipe issues

Google uses Recipe Microformat for Search

From 2010 Google started officially using hRecipe Microformat for Search to improve search results. See the Google Webmaster announcement from a year ago – Better Recipes on the web: Introducing Recipe Rich Snippets:

And now scroll up to the first paragraph.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee launches site for British gov

He invented a technology that has transformed the world into a more transparent and much more productive environment. in 2001 he’s published The Semantic Web. His recent work included launching British government site http://data.gov.uk/ that’s based on the Semantic Web and consists of many brilliant mashups, “the main product of collaboration brings structure to the meaningful content of Web pages“. At TED’s Sir is explaining the Semantic Web, and much more. Very interesting.

Google Recipes Rich Snippet and Microformats

Dinner tonight… You can Google it or Bing it. Bing gives a special placement to recipes and displays it like this in Bing search results:

Google came up with the Rich Snippet Recipe Tool.  The recipe must be programmed using microformats – hRecipe, and a list of artifacts where you should specify name, recipeType, photo, published, summary, review, prepTime, cookTime, totalTime, nutrition, instructions, yield, ingredients and author – see the spec in Google blog. Using Rich Snippets and special markup techniques, this creates a great opportunity for the recipe-based websites to utilize microformats and start validating the markup to make sure results show as you would expect.