Yahoo! Announces Common Tag: Like The Meta Keywords Tag, But Even Better

Description

Yahoo! Announces Common Tag: Like The Meta Keywords Tag, But Even Better

Yahoo! recently announced their role in creating and supporting Common Tag , a new semantic tagging format.

Yahoo! says that Common Tag makes “web content more discoverable” and enables the community to “create more useful applications for aggregating, searching, and browsing the web.” Their blog post mentions that they want to accelerate the structuring of the web, which aligns with their SearchMonkey launch last year, which they said was, in part, an attempt to encourage the use of structured data on the web. This brings to mind a few questions.

Why did the web need a new semantic standard? The Common Tag blog explains:

“Semantic web promises havens. The promise of machines understanding the data and acting on it semi-autonomously. But how do we get there? Not many are willing to put in a lot of work into publishing data in new formats. For the benefit that might or might not come years after enormous resources will be spent?

So why not start with something easy, say tagging? Marking up text with exactly defined concepts. “

OK, maybe “explains” isn’t the right word.

This question really goes to the heart of what’s curious about Common Tag. Yahoo called it a “ new semantic tagging format” in its blog post, but when we asked them why the web needed something new, they clarified that it’s an RDFa vocabulary, not something made from whole cloth. The Common Tag About page also implies that this is really just part of the standards that all the major search engines have joined together to support. “In addition, search engines like Yahoo and Google have begun reading RDFa—the markup standard used by the Common Tag format—to acquire richer information about sites that use it… ...

Original URL

http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-announces-common-tag-like-the-meta-keywords-tag-but-even-better-21021

http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-announces-common-tag-like-the-meta-keywords-tag-but-even-better-21021