Google supports Facebook Share & SearchMonkey video formats
Google has announced that it now supports the Facebook Share and SearchMonkey RDFa formats for video, allowing site owners to tell Google about videos using simple HTML markup.
Google has announced that it now supports the Facebook Share and Yahoo! SearchMonkey RDFa for video formats. These formats allow site owners to submit their videos for inclusion into Google Video Search and, more importantly, into Google’s main search results as well via Universal Search.
Google already supports two formats for submitting videos – its own Video Sitemaps format and the MediaRSS format. However, these two newly supported formats are different in nature – Video Sitemaps and MediaRSS are XML feed based formats, whereas these two newly supported formats are embedded into HTML pages like microformats using standard HTML markup.
It’s not yet clear whether Google will be only be using these additional formats as another method for discovering videos for Video search or whether they will also be using them to generate Rich Snippets for web pages that include them. I have tested Google’s Rich Snippets Testing Tool with a few web pages which embed videos using the Facebook Share format and it doesn’t appear to recognise them, although it’s possible that the tool has simply not been updated yet. We will have to wait and see.
It’s good to see co-operation on standards by the search engines – Yahoo! also supports Facebook’s format (as does Facebook of course). The sheer number of different standards might potentially be an area of concern, however. Although having both XML and HTML formats makes sense, there are now two competing XML formats and two competing HTML formats. It seems that, for now, the search engines want to let the market decide, and it’s entirely possible that formats which don’t see widespread adoption will see support dropped further down the line.
Exactly how these HTML-based formats will fit with the previously supported XML-based ones has yet to be seen – however, at the moment there is nothing to suggest that they should instantly replace the XML types. It seems rather likely that the two types of formats will be complementary rather than competitive – there’s no reason not to use both HTML formats embedded within web pages and separate XML feeds. Different web services will support different formats, and using both may increase the chances of discovery.
Tags: Google, microformats, searchmonkey, yahoo!