Semantics and SEOs

I recently attended a Developer Summit (GIDS) and got bit by the 'Semantic Web' after the presentation by Scott Davis. Since then I had been looking out for the semantics present in web pages and how the Search Engines are consuming the same.

Google

And couple of days back I landed on searching "events in bangalore today" in Google. In the result page I noticed the 4th (EventFul.com) and 7th (IndoBase.com) record were provided with additional info in the search page itself.

The EventFul.com page (4th record) has a list of events happening in the Bangalore city. The HTML tags for the events are appropriately tagged with vevent semantics. (Note: The vevent semantic uses hCalendar properties). The properties used are: vevent, url, dtstart (value-title, title) & location. All these attributes are specified inside html-class attribute.








e.g:


<table>
<tr class="vevent">
   <td class="photo">
      <a href="http://eventful.com/bangalore/events/alphonso-mango-festival-/E0-001-038915626-1">AN IMAGE TAG</a>
   </td>
   <td>
     <h2><a class="summary url" href="http://eventful.com/bangalore/events/alphonso-mango-festival-/E0-001-038915626-1">Alphonso Mango Festival</a></h2>
     <strong><span class="dtstart"> 1 May <span class="value-title" title="2011-05-01T00:00:00"></span></span></strong>
     <p class="place location">Mama Mia , Church Street</p>
   </td>
</tr>
</table>


The detail page for the events also presented with the same semantics detail for every event. In addition they also have added 'geo-location' info for the venue with 'geo' property, which again is part of HTML-class attribute.
Lets peep into the IndoBase.com (7th record) site. Surprisingly there is no semantic with vevent or hcalendar! But I noticed the URL itself contain the info.
The all events page URL is: http://www.indobase.com/events/city/bangalore-india.php. This can be split as domain / events / city / value-for-city-with-country.
One of the details page URL is: http://www.indobase.com/events/details/photo-today.php. This can be split as domain / events / details / eventName. There is no other info for dtstart, url or location etc. Yet Google is able to identify the details. Great!!
I suppose IndoBase.com might be using RDFa format.

Yahoo!

After learning these nitigritties about Semantices, I thought of exploring Yahoo! search for the same. It presented a very interesting output!

Yahoo! search did not provide any additional info for each Search result. But if you notice the left-side navigation, you will see Eventful link with the favicon of EventFul.com website, right below 'Show all' link.

This link provides results only from the EventFul.com website alone. IndoBase.com is appearing on the second page of Yahoo! search result, again no additional info related to this website is seen. I am not sure what made the 'EventFul' link appear in the left-nav in Yahoo!, but surely the semantics should have played a role in there.

Bing

It seems agnostic to semantics :(