Schema.org “Consumer” Apps

May 19, 2015
RobertK

Though Google, Bing, Yahoo and Yandex are quick to point out the search engine optimization benefits of SCHEMA.ORG markup, we have yet to see applications that consume Schema markup and use it in interesting and useful ways.  One possible exception: a Custom Search Application provided by Google that enables a webmaster (such as Thematix) to provide an on-site search engine, constrained by Schema.org types.

In this case, we specified that the pages had to have “Event” related markup.  Is this of any use to you in spotting events, by say, subject matter (“Autos” or “banking”) or location (“Pittsburgh” or “London”)? The search is of the whole web, but emphasizes those with markup.

Type in a term and hit “Search” — what turns up?


 

 

5 Comments. Leave new

Chris Regan
May 19, 2015 10:28 pm

I tried financial services terms, such as ‘banking conferences’. Oxford Martin School (University of Oxford) was often the first SERP, yet it only contains one instance of http://schema.org/Event with three following ‘itemprops’. Then I noted Infomine in the SERPs (example: http://www.infomine.com/events/Cantech.Investment.Conference.CANTECH.2016–IM30331.aspx) and then noted, in the HTML code, this item: returnUrl = encodeURIComponent(‘http://thematix.com/schema-org-consumer-apps/’);.
None of the SERPs contained either RDFa or JSON-LD.

Reply

Sorted by date, the top 100 results for seminar reach back to 2015-01-21.

The top 100 results for event reach back to 2015-01-15.

Something (the configuration of the search?) appears sub-optimal 😉

The event results are limited to oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk, infomine.com, sourcesecurity.com, globalsources.com (1), http://www.aices.rwth-aachen.de, and tradeshows.tradeindia.com (1).

I believe that some domains are missing!

Reply

You are correct! I changed the configuration to “search the web but emphasize included sites” — this results in a more robust but somewhat less relevant search result.

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Margaret Warren
May 22, 2015 3:49 pm

I tried terms like ‘Indy 500’ and ‘rock concert’…no results. What else should we be trying?

Reply

Hi Margaret — per the message to Nexcerpt below, I found that Google was constraining the search to 200 web sites. I changed this, and search results are now much more robust. The top results for “Indy 500” do seem to contain some microdata markup (and some of it is even correct).

– rob

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