03 June 2011 | Author: N. Hamilton Media copywriter

Google, Bing and Yahoo! share search schema

They might spend most of their time squabbling over global search shares, but Google, Bing and Yahoo! have come together to announce the launch of a shared search initiative - with added "geek factor".

According to Web Pro News, the three search musketeers yesterday launched Schema.org - a web initiative that supports a common set of schemas for structured data mark-up on web pages.

Schema.org is set to provide tips and tools to help webmasters use a shared data mark-up vocabulary to gain visibility in Bing, Yahoo! and Google search results.

Speaking for Bing and Bing-hoo!, a Microsoft spokesman told WebProNews that implementing a common set of schemas for data mark-up purposes would benefit the search industry, not to mention consumers and searchers.

"Over the past two years," he said, "Bing has worked to improve the search experience to better reflect both the evolving Web and changing consumer habits. While this effort [Schema.org] has major 'geek factor,' it serves as quite significant advancement for both the search industry and consumers."

On an official Google webmaster blog, Google added that Schema.org will feature over 100 new mark-up types as well as existing rich snippet types - making it invaluable for webmasters looking to boost a site's SERP rankings.

Google also revealed that Schema.org will use microdata for structured data mark-up - not microformats or RDFa; but will continue to support existing rich snippet markup formats. However, Google has advised webmasters not to combine the new Schema.org mark-up with existing microformats or RDFa mark-ups as doing so could badly affect visibility.

Google blogged: "At Google, we've supported structured markup for a couple years now. We introduced rich snippets in 2009 to better represent search results describing people or containing reviews. We've since expanded to new kinds of rich snippets, including products, events, recipes, and more.

"Adoption by the webmaster community has grown rapidly and today we're able to show rich snippets in search results more than ten times as often as when we started two years ago.

"We want to continue making the open web richer and more useful.

"We know that it takes time and effort to add this markup to your pages, and adding markup is much harder if every search engine asks for data in a different way. That's why we've come together with other search engines to support a common set of schemas, just as we came together to support a common standard for sitemaps in 2006."

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