Google has announced a few updates to its search engine during its Searchology event.
Google will now support microformats and RDFa to show rich snippets from a web page. Considering that these technologies were developed to extract structured data from web pages, search engines should have adopted them long back, and in fact helped them grow. I sincerely hope that support from a search giant like Google will drive their adoption.
Google will now also let you slice and dice your search results through Search Options. Then there is also Google Squared, which does not retrieve web pages, but extracts information from them and organizes it. I am a bit less excited about these as they seem to be more about taking on the likes of Twitter’s real time search and Wolfram Alpha.
Though these changes will be significant, I get a feeling that this time Google was playing catch up than a sincere intent to improve the search. And I cannot help but wonder if it will be better for the users if Google can collaborate with the complementary strengths instead of competing with them.
