google

For a large site that I maintain, we recently disabled the XML Sitemap module (we're using the 1.x branch) and switched to the Google Sitemap Generators tool (the Python one). We have noticed a few unsurprising things, and a few very surprising things.

We identified five big differences (all positive) that we have seen since moving to the Google Sitemap Generators Python tool.

Did you know that you can configure Google Scholar to provide RIS download links?

RIS is an industry-standard format for importing and exporting bibliography information. Recently I posted a PHP library for working with RIS files. I wanted to find a good search tool that would allow me to find articles, and then download them into Lantern (a project I will release soon).

RefMan is a popular tool that also uses the RIS format. So to enable RIS downloads, simply tell Google Scholar to provide RefMan support.

Here are the steps to do this:

1. Log into Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com)
2. Click on scholar preferences next to the Search button.
3. Scroll to the bottom of the configuration screen to Bibliography Manager and choose RefMan

Here's a screenshot showing the last step.
Bibliography Manager Settings

Once you have saved those preferences, every article in your search results should have an Import into RefMan link next to it.

I've seen a couple of unimpressive RDFa demonstrations. They tend to involve either a beta search server from Yahoo! or a custom tool with ugly regular expressions. In spite of the quality of the presentations, though, I was sold on the value of using RDFa to embed metadata into HTML. But what good is metadata-rich markup when use case #1 (better SEO) is still absent? The tide is changing -- or, perhaps, has already changed.

Google now says that it supports both RDFa and microformats:

At Google, we believe in openness, so we are using two open standards to allow you to annotate structured data on your site: microformats and RDFa. Both standards allow markup of information on your pages. To ensure that Google understands your markup, we encourage you to follow the format of our examples. You don't need any prior knowledge of microformats or RDFa to use these standards, just a basic knowledge of XHTML.

(http://google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99170)

Google lists at least a few microformats that they support, and offer a brief primer on RDFa and (apparently) how Google looks for RDFa information.

As I write this, I'm seeing Twitter messages pointing to O'Reilly's article discussing the same. It is clear that there is a new way for SEO....

Who says the Semantic Web is irrelevant?