[uf-discuss] Microformat Base

Sun Dec 4 11:29:33 PST 2005

Tantek Çelik wrote:
> Consider adding hReview as well!

I did that. I also cleared out all the data and changed it so it 
doesn't follow links from sites with no microformats, in an attempt 
to limit the scope a bit. Turns out I don't have the storage space to 
catalog every URL on the web. Anything not connected to 
microformats.org via pages containing microformats can still be added 
manually, and I made a simple submission form for that [1].
Craig Ogg wrote:
> On 12/1/05, Scott Reynen <scott at randomchaos.com> wrote:
>> I thought I'd go ahead and play around with a microformat-based
>> alternative to Google Base. So far, I have a basic spider that I set
>> loose from microformats.org to slowly wander the web. When it finds
>> any known microformat-associated class names, it records the data
>> which can then be searched here:
>> This is very cool, but I don't think it is really an alternative to
> Google Base.

I don't think it's a viable alternative myself. I wrote in my 
weblog: "One suggestion, popular - of course - among the microformats 
community, was that Google could use microformats to remove the need 
for submission to their base and leverage the distributed nature of 
the web. Personally, I suspect there's just not enough microformatted 
content out there yet to make it worth Google's cycles parsing 
it." [2]. But I thought it better to try and prove myself wrong with 
some code than to just speculate about it.
Peace,
Scott
[1] http://www.randomchaos.com/microformats/base/
[2] http://weblog.randomchaos.com/archive/2005/11/30/Microformat_Base/