A new announcement has taken the world of SEO by storm – A new initiative by search engine leaders Google, Yahoo! and Bing to make life a little easier for webmasters who want to add rich snippets markup to their web pages. The difficulty lies in the fact that all search engines ask for data to be configured in a different way.

With the launch of schema.org, search engines offer a common set of schemas for the addition of rich snippet markup to web pages. There is absolutely no doubt about the benefits of Schema.org from the webmaster perspective, but what of the user. Can the user experience and appreciate the benefits of this new development?

The answer is – Yes they can. This can best be explained with an example.

This is an example of a rich snippet. It offers a collection of constructive information about the review of X-Men: First Class.

The benefits of Schema.org for users like you and me can be understood from this rich snippet.

A complete information package

What do you need from a movie review? You want to know if people actually liked it or not. The example gives you a clear picture in terms of the reception that the movie has received, till date. Just one look and you have all the information you need. You don’t even have to read the review. You can take an informed decision just by looking at the snippet.

Structured Information

The information on offer follows a structure. If you look at it closely, it offers you a star rating and it also offers you a percentage. The percentage tells you about the number of people who have liked the movie (figures are pertinent to the site). It also tells readers about the number of reviews available on that particular site. When you look at the snippet, you know what to expect and the amount of information about that particular topic available on the site.

Best Possible Information

The fluff is removed and you get information from the best possible sources. You know you can depend on the information that you are looking at. More importantly, the information is offered keeping in mind the different requirements of a user. So, somebody who is only looking for the ‘stars’ will get what he wants, while somebody else looking for a ‘percentage’ will get what she wants and so on and so forth.

Saves Time

We are an impatient bunch of people when it comes to searching for information on the World Wide Web. We want information that is complete and that too quickly. We want to make an informed decision on as limited information as possible. Search engines offer us just that. A look at the rich snippet and we are done. More importantly, they offer us the kind of information that tells us whether we should access the particular link or not; whether it’s going to be useful for us or not.

All this and a whole lot more is a result of Schema.org. This is just a tip of the iceberg. There are plenty of benefits that we might not even notice and take them as a natural course of events. We might not realize that our ‘search’ lives have benefitted through the collective efforts of the Search Engines and the webmasters.