Mahalo Adds Microformats

Mahalo, the people powered search engine, just rolled out microformats for certain search results. Sean Percival told me about the rollout earlier this evening, and I had to admit a shocking amount of ignorance when I asked what he meant exactly by ‘microformats.’  I’ve never had the opportunity to actually use this technology and couldn’t imagine what application the term would have in the context of search, but I did a quick run of research on the topic and brought myself up to speed.

After a bit of looking, you’ll find, like me, that you’re familiar with several things that fall under the umbrella of Microformats, even if you’ve never heard the term used before. For example, there’s hCard, the microformat for contact information, and rel-nofollow, the microformat attribute designed to discourage splogging and comment spam.

Other than those two subsets of microformats, I really haven’t had the opportunity to take advantage of microformats much (and frankly, since switching to GMail over a client side solution, I haven’t done much with hCard other than to synchronize a couple mobile devices).

That’s not uncommon, and that’s probably why Sean gave a good example on how to take advantage of the feature from within the browser:

Getting Started:
1. Firefox users can download the Operator plugin to get instant Microformats support.
2. Visit the Paris Hotels page on Mahalo
3. Notice the Operator plugin in the top left of the below image. Every hotel featured on the page is now available for quick and easy export. You also get a few other nice features like quick access to mapping websites. Get the data you need and drop it into your address book and phone with a few clicks.

It’s a useful feature, and an interesting upgrade I haven’t seen on any other search engines so far. It might just even inspire me to break out my old WinCE device and test it out.

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