Searching Structured Data Using Microformats

In the well-of-course-he-did department, Tantek just announced the beta of Technorati's Microformats Search. Hopefully this will help accelerate deployment of structured data onthe public web.  Their beta main page adds on some special sections ifa keyword search gets results containing microformats:

1. events results for San Francisco - View 32 events
   
   Barcamp San Francisco - 2 minutes ago
   BarCamp San Francisco - 5 minutes ago
   Supernova 2006 workshop: Decentralizing Data - 5 minutes ago
2. contacts results for San Francisco - View 16 contacts
   
   Amber - 1 hour ago
   Matisse Enzer - 1 hour ago
   Kevin Marks - 5 hours ago
3. reviews results for San Francisco - View 5 reviews
   
   Review of: Delfina Restaurant - 2 days ago
   His&nbspBand&nbspAnd&nbspThe&nbspStreet&nbspChoir by Va... - 5 days ago
   Climate change is a hot topic right now. The Economist has ... - 12 days ago

And you can do domain-specific searches as well, for example for events matching "San Francisco". So far you can't do much with the data except jump to the source page. The obvious thing is to support an add to contacts or add to calendaroption.

There's a companion service, pingerati.net,to enable real time indexing; it's also a ping hub.  The idea here isthat if you want to get updates about structured data from around theweb, you can register with pingerati and get their feed of pings aswell, without needing to go around and convince everyone to ping yourservice.  For example, evdb will get auto-notified if you pingpingerati.net.  Naturally, any existing Technorati feed update pings also get fed in.

Being a hub is nice.

Tags: microformats, search, pingerati, hCard, hCalendar, hReview, ping, hub