[uf-discuss] IsItSafeToVisit implements hReview and Google Rich Snippets

[Kavi Goel]

Hi Marshall,

One of the challenges of deploying a standard UI on the Google search
results page for any type of "review" site is that there are so many
variations. I agree that the risk level of visiting a country doesn't
map well to rating stars, so Rich Snippets for hreview-aggregate
probably isn't currently a good fit for those web pages.

You also bring up a question around value-title. If you have an
example of something that isn't working as expected, feel free to send
me the page and I can pass it on to the Rich Snippets engineers to see
if there is an issue on our end.

Kavi (on behalf of the Rich Snippets team)


On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 6:28 AM, Marshall Yount <marshall at downtempo.net> wrote:
>
> Hello Microformats list!  I'm a long time listener, first time caller,
> and all that.
>
> I hope this message is not double posted.  I think my last mail was
> rejected due to it not being plaintext.
>
> I've been working on a side project and encountered some excitement
> (read: problems) in trying to implement a microformat therein.
>
> IsItSafeToVisit.com is a microvertical which aggregates travel
> advisories from a number of different ratings agencies to give each
> country in the world a safety rating.
>
> Our pages look like this:
> http://isitsafetovisit.com/Vietnam
> http://isitsafetovisit.com/Argentina
> etc.
>
> We recently decided to deploy microformats on the site.  We briefly
> considered creating a new microformat for travel advisories, but
> realized that we would get way more mileage out of utilizing hReview.
> The fields in a travel advisory actually map quite cleanly to the
> hReview format.
>
> We were thrilled when Google added Rich Snippets support to their search engine!
>
> And then less thrilled to find out how limited their support turned out to be.
>
> We have historically ranked each country on a text based safety scale
> (Low Risk, Some Risk, High Risk, Really High Risk, Ridiculously High
> Risk). Each of these text descriptions maps back to a numerical score
> inside of our system, but we'd rather not display the numbers if
> possible.
>
> Some questions:
> 1) In order to get the Rich Snippets preview tool to work properly, I
> created a hidden div which contains the appropriate tags, that you can
> unhide by clicking on the safety rating.  This behavior is explicitly
> forbidden in the Google Documentation, so I'm not sure whether this
> will exclude us.  Does anyone know how Google handles things like
> this?
> 2) We'd rather not have our safety rating displayed in Rich Snippets
> using stars.  Travelers tend to associate stars with an indication of
> quality.  Is there a way to get Google to display our rating without
> the stars?
> 3) We attempted to use hReview aggregate for our master average rating
> and the object include tag in the individual advisories.  I know that
> Google does not implement the object include syntax, but can anyone
> tell me if this has been implemented properly?  Is there an alternate
> hReview scanner available that supports these features?
> 4) Should hReview elements be nested inside of hReview-aggregate elements?
> 5) Supposedly Rich Snippets supports the value-title feature of
> mciroformats, but the preview tool does not reflect these fields if
> present.  Should I use value-title instead of my hidden div?
>
> At this point I'm starting feel it would be best to implement the
> microformat correctly and forget about the Google support.  Maybe we
> should create a Yahoo SearchMonkey plugin that works exactly the way
> we want it to?  Unfortunately Yahoo sends us very little traffic (less
> than 2%), so this seems like potentially a waste of time :(
>
> Thanks for your help!
>
> --
> marshall yount
> chief technology officer, downtempo llc
> www.downtempo.net
>
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