I’m just starting to think about the avenues opened by Google Base, but this brings a question: why doesn’t Google “simply” index metadata attached to web pages?
Look for example at what PiggyBank does, any web page having a link like
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rdf+xml" title="Metadata about this page" href="http://somewhere-on-the-web.com/page224/metadata.rdf">
would have its metadata indexed.
And of course it doesn’t have to be RDF. Talking about this with Sylvain the other day, he came up with
<link rel="alternate" type="application/googlebase+xml" title="Metadata about this page" href="http://somewhere-on-the-web.com/page224/metadata.xml">
Where Google might accept the same formats as the Google Base bulk upload does.
Simple enough, or not? I wonder why they’re not doing that already, it would be a nice way of making the web more semantic, incrementally, with little additional effort on their part (well, a few more containers maybe ;-)
The motivation for people to add this metadata would certainly be high: who doesn’t want their web pages to be better indexed?
