Case Study: Improving Web Search Using Metadata

The majority of Web pages today are generated from databases, and Web site owners increasingly are providing APIs to this data or embedding information inside their HTML pages with microformats, eRDF, or RDFa. In other cases, structured data can be extracted with relative ease from Web pages that follow a template using XSLT stylesheets.

SearchMonkey reuses structured data to improve search result display with benefits to both search users, developers, and publishers of web content. The first type of applications are focusing on remaking the abstracts on the search result page: Figure 1 shows the kind of presentations that structured data enables in this space. Based on data, the image representing the object can be easily singled out. One can also easily select the most important attributes of the object to be shown in a table format. Similarly for links: the data tells which links represent important actions the user can take (e.g. play the video, buy the product) and these links can be arranged in a way that their function is clear. In essence, knowledge of the data and its semantics enables to present the page in a much more informative, attractive, and concise way.