We all love Google, right?

I love Google. I love most of their products; Gmail, Reader, Docs and who could forget good old search.

Over the years many have accused Google of things such as stealing revenue, diverting traffic to competitive brands and other such offenses. Sometimes I agree, and sometimes I don't, but the fact remains that Google displays information from other sites that, at times makes it so a user does not actually have to visit that site. Maps, weather, news, movie times are all served up by Google; and there are content owners out there that are not happy about it.

I , or one, believe believe in the adage, "information needs to be free" (not free as in unpaid, free as in unchained) but I always ask the question, "at what point will Google's business model begin to harm content creators to a point where consumers feel a negative effect?".

Today I offer you an interesting case.

Google has announced Rich Snippets; a new way they are looking at data on the web and presenting it to searchers.

Before we dive deeper into what this means, let's take a step back and talk about structured data. Some of you may know what structured data is, but I want to make sure that people reading this blog who do not know, get themselves caught up. At it's most basic, structured data (as it pertains to search) is the act of adding additional meaning to your content through the categorical tagging--thus creating a "structural" foundation for your content.

For example, take a look at the two lines below and the surrounding tags. The tags provide no additional meaning to the text. They just state the obvious or explicit meaning of the text, "this is a paragraph".

<p>This is the most important information on this page</p>

<p>This is the second most important piece of information on this page</p>

The above are examples of unstructured data. The enclosing tags add no meaning to the content and do not help search engines figure out the meaning of the text. A very basic example of structuring this data would be to do the following:

<h1>This is the most important information on this page</h1>

<h2>This is the second most important piece of information on this page</h2>

This is a very simple modification, but now search engines can use the enclosing tags to determine additional information about the text. Search engines know that people use <h1> tags for the most important information on a page (well, people should be doing this, but often fail to--this is not good). By adding a "meta-layer" of information, or structuring the data, search engines can better determine what a page is about and serve up better search results.

Rich Snippets take this concept to greater depth by using microformats and RDFa. Google has recently adopted the use of microformats (something that Yahoo has acknowledged for quite some time already). These formats allow content creators to use semantic markup, or structured data to add meaning to the their content, and have it be discoverable based on attributes other than the implied meaning.

The example that Google gives us, and the first instance of the use of this new way to deliver search results is in search reviews.

In this SERP you will notice that Google has not only delivered a result where you can get reviews about the Drooling Dog, they have actually included a verbatim from a review on Yelp. Some site owners may relish the fact that Google is highlighting content from their site and therefore building awareness and ultimately driving traffic. On the flip side, if the SERP gives a user all of the information that they need, the user may have no use for the site at all--rendering the content creator useless. While I imagine the latter will be less common, it is still a reality.

You Have No Choice, Give Into The Google

You can fight it all you want, but ultimately, if your reviews are not listed in Google, someone elses will be. My advice to you is strcuture your data. Here is the raw structured data that Google used to derive the SERP above:

This is the microformat version:

this is the RDFA version

Notice that the content creator has given the information additional attributes to allow Google to recognize the data as a review. Without this additional semantic markup, Google would not be able to create a search listing with the review in it.

Ultimately, the future of information on the web will be decreasingly siloed--i.e. less destinations, more relevant information. The social web is playing a role in the destruction of the destination web, but semantic search is playing an equal, if not greater role. Are you prepared for the future of the web? Is your data formatted to be spreadable?