Since Wolfram|Alpha launched in 2009, I’ve often wondered if the company would allow users to use their extremely powerful computing infrastructure to analyze their own data along with data sets available on the open web.

Well, they have and that’s what Wolfram|Alpha Pro is all about. As I wrote a few week’s ago, I’m a frequent W|A user and long-time admirer of the company and it’s founder, Stephen Wolfram. I think they’ve scored again.

The service has an introductory rate of $4.99/month with a reduced rate of $2.99/month for students. The company offers pricing for the enterprise. So, what does this initial launch offer?

Wolfram|Alpha Pro: Key Features

• Ability to Analyze Your Own Datasets Input of upload a data set and let Wolfram’s technology automatically recognize and analyze the data. For example, a timeline of your email, your credit card expenses, or a data set obtained from Data.gov.

• Data in more than 60 file formats can be uploaded and analyzed. From an XLS spreadsheet to an HTML document to the audio in a WAV file. Image files (in many formats) can also be analyzed. As you would expect, many science and math formats are also included.

• Access to extended keyboards like the one available with the Wolfram|Alpha mobile apps.

• Visualized and interactive results using the CDF (computational data format) that Wolfram launched last July.

What’s not available today is the ability to publish and compare, comment on or share results. According to Stephen Wolfram, these options are forthcoming.

I’ll can say now that while some of what Wolfram|Alpha Pro has to offer might not be for everybody today it very likely will be in the future as the amount of data available to analyze (personal data and publicly available datasets) continues to skyrocket.

In other words, Wolfram|Alpha pro is getting in on the ground floor of personal data analysis with a powerful but at the same time very easy to use tool that will appeal to everyone as data analysis moves out of the lab and office and into just about everyplace else.

Postscript by Barry Schwartz: On February 8th, Stephen Wolfram posted more details about this Pro offering on their blog.

This means select BMW vehicles (see below for list) and is available in the US only for now. However Yelp’s international coverage makes it probable that the partnership will roll out more broadly if it proves successful in the US.

Yelp offered some screens of the BMW in-car search on its blog:

Select models that can access the Yelp content include the following:

• 2009 and later Z4, 1, 3 and 7 Series
• 2010 and later 5 and 6 Series
• 2010 and later X5 and X6
• 2011 and later X3

Google, Bing and Mapquest have mapping and local search deals with various car makers. Ford has also invested in making its Sync in-dash navigation and content system compatible with numerous smartphones. This is the direction that we’ll see more and more carmakers go: integration of smartphone apps into in-dash content systems.

The Yelp-BMW announcement is a high-profile deal that may boost confidence in its forthcoming IPO among some investors. The company is seeking to raise as much as $100 million through a public offering that will likely happen in Q1 of next year.

Yelp previously reported that 40 percent of its query volume is now coming from mobile devices. Add BMW to the list.

Related Entries

• Google Maps “Send To Car” Running Out Of Gas?
• Bing Scores First In-Car Search Deal With Toyota
• Send To (German) Car: The New Local Search Front
• MapQuest Partners With GM’s OnStar For ‘Send to Car‘ Directions
• Google Maps Now With “Send To Garmin”
• Send To TomTom: Google Maps Partners With Personal Nav Device Maker

Siri, the voice recognition app that comes standard with the new iPhone, can be used to control text messaging and reminders inside the device. But it can also be used as a search tool, to call up specific information from the outside world.

With the mobile search space already in flux, Siri adds a game-changing angle, particularly for marketers that want to reach the lucrative (presumably affluent) iPhone audience.

Here are some factors for businesses to consider as Siri grows in both audience and usage:

• Siri works. Siri’s voice recognition is nearly flawless, and its utility right now is only limited by the APIs that Apple has given it to work with. It’s likely that the API list will grow, giving iPhone users access to pretty much any form of information they can verbally request.
• Siri is a velvet rope. Apple’s choice of APIs to power Siri will, in effect, choose the leading search tools for the iPhone. As Danny Sullivan and Greg Sterling reported, an iPhone user can ask Siri to use Bing or Yahoo to perform a search. But Google is the default, and most users will take the default option if it serves them well.
• Pick your battle. For any given business, there will be one all-important API that needs to know who you are. Today, that’s pretty much limited to Google Search, Google Places and Yelp. But in the future, Apple may add APIs to cover more niches. For example, if one of the many physician portals is chosen as the API for look-ups, then it will be very important for doctors to get listed there.
• Make that two APIs. Google is also advancing the voice recognition functions on Android, and may match Siri for ease of use. If so, you can expect their “Siri” (“Andrew”?) to become the lead search method on many other smartphones. In which case, all the planning implied above gets doubled, with two tracks of promotional tactics to hit both platforms.
• Siri likes keywords. When searching for restaurants that serve ravioli, Siri returns a list of places that mention ravioli in their Yelp reviews. Yes folks, keyword optimization is still very much the name of the game.
• Siri localizes by default. “Show me restaurants” uses the Location Services in my iPhone to correctly assume that I want a list of Boston restaurants.
• Punjabi “Dubba”. One of my favorite Indian places is Punjabi Dhaba, a fast-paced joint that serves fresh, hot Indian on mess-hall steel trays. But Siri can’t understand the name. Fortunately, they happen to be No. 1 when you ask for a list of Indian places in Cambridge. In this case, attention to both keywords and category choices can help make up for a name that voice recognition systems find challenging.

Siri can find restaurants by type, and even by keyword, but sometimes has difficulty recognizing names.

As Apple continues to develop Siri, we’ll see what directions it (she?) takes, and I’ll post updates here to track how it impacts mobile search marketing.

When you look at the type schema you see close to 300 metadata elements that can describe various entities (called Things here).

There is lot of specificity in a few categories such as Local Businesses, Civic Structures and Events. Two of these categories have real implications for local and mobile SEO because of the richness of the metadata.

Below you see the high-level organizational taxonomy for the MicroData entities. It has up to five levels depending upon which category you are looking at. Here you see that three levels are associated with Local Business, while the Persons and Product groups have no subcategories.

Things

The high-level property elements for Things include Name, URL, Image and Description. These properties are applied to all of the following seven subcategories.

1. Creative Work — Text and metadata include ratings, reviews and offers.
2. Events — Metadata elements includes time, who, place and related events.
3. Intangibles — This is dynamic metadata about quantities and values.
4. Organizations — Metadata to include location, founders, employees and contact info.
5. Persons — Metadata includes title, awards, affiliations, family relationships, personal information and contact information.
6. Places — Metadata about photos, maps, addresses and contact information
7. Products — Metadata about brand, model, manufacturer and reviews.

Let’s take a look at each of these seven categories in a little more detail to see what might be valuable to a B2B marketing executive. Not all will be useful; some will be pure media plays, while others will be B2C oriented.

Creative Works

The properties available in the Creative Works category are metadata elements used to describe all the elements of a piece of creative work. This includes things like identifying headlines, the editor, genre and author. Many more properties are described at the creative works link above.

The properties apply to all the subcategories in the Creative Works group, which include the following types:

Events

Eleven properties are available in the Events category for describing web pages that contain event information. Events can also be broken into super or subevents. For example, if you are putting on several presentations at trades shows, these can be called out individually. Subcategories for events include:

Intangibles

The four properties available in the Intangibles category describe dynamic or intangible data. Examples include the format of a book, the condition of an item, the price, the availability and the seller of the item. Sub-categories include:

Organizations

The 16 properties available in the Organizations category are for classifying data elements that deal with common company information. A large number of the properties focus on contact information, company facts and employees. There are also ratings and review properties.

Person

There are 27 properties available in the Persons category for classifying data elements about a person. You find properties that describe organizational affiliations, alumni status, job title, nationality and the name of the person’s spouse.

There are no subcategories for the Persons group, which is surprising. When you review business websites in any number you see a handful of very defined groups of people. Almost every website has a listing for their Board of Directors, C-level executive, advisory / technical boards and other named teams.

Often, the names of investors are provided as well. You could tag a person with the job title property. If you have a board with seven members you would have to do this seven times. Having a named subgroup that includes more than one individual makes more sense because this reflects current common practice on the Internet.

Place

The 12 properties in the Places category describe unique locations such as a building or a landform. You can specify that a place is part of a larger geographic location. Beyond this the properties are what you would expect: maps, photos, address and telephone numbers.

The Local Business subgroup below is the same one found in the Organizations category.

Products

The seven properties in the Products category are for describing the elements of a product. These properties include specifying a brand name, the manufacturer’s name and product identification numbers, to name a few.

Given the prominent role that products play in Internet commerce, I was surprised at how few properties there are, and I think this will be an issue for successfully deploying the MicroData standard.

Here are some of the elements that I think are missing:

• High-level designation: is it a B2B product or a B2C product.
• Age range for the intended product.
• Industry target: e.g., healthcare, entertainment, financial and technology.
• Product category: e.g., books, clothing, garden, grocery and sports.
• Gender: shoes for example.
• Price or price range.

To be fair, some of these properties are found in the Intangibles category, such as price and seller property. But why these properties are there instead of in Products is a real mystery.

The second problem with this category is there are no subcategories at all for the Products group. It’s almost impossible to find a shopping site that does not have a product taxonomy that is used to navigationally organize company’s wares.

These taxonomies exist for a reason: They work for both the website owner and the consumer. This section really needs to be expanded in the next version of the MicroData specification.

Local Business

I mentioned earlier that a couple of categories had lot of subcategories in its hierarchy. Local Business (part of Organizations) is one example with 27 subgroups that break down into 120 categories.

One of the Local Businesses subcategories called Stores has 30 subcategories in its group alone.

Business names could be used to complement what is missing in the Product category, but it’s far from optimal. For example there is no Internet, Software or Technology categories in the existing taxonomy. The subcategories for Local Business include:

• Animal Shelter
• Automotive Business (ten subcategories)
• Child Care
• Dry Cleaning / Laundry
• Emergency Service (three subcategories)
• Employment Agency
• Entertainment Business (seven subcategories)
• Financial Service (four subcategories)
• Food Establishment (eight subcategories)
• Government Office (one subcategories)
• Health And Beauty Business (five subcategories)
• Home And Construction Business (eight subcategories)
• Internet Cafe
• Library
• Lodging Business (four subcategories)
• Medical Organization (seven subcategories)
• Professional Service (ten subcategories)
• Radio Station
• Real Estate Agent
• Recycling Center
• Self-Storage
• Shopping Center
• Sports Activity Location
• Store (30 subcategories)
• Television Station
• Tourist Information Center
• Travel Agency

Data Type

The Data Type feels like it is unfinished. Sometimes it’s useful to describe content at a high-level as structured (e.g., numbers) or unstructured data (e.g., text). There is value in specifying a structured data element if you have complex web pages with tables, graphs and text.

For example, being able to define a table, having it survive the indexing process intact as a single entity and returning it as a single search result is certainly valuable. Being able to define an image as a chart or an Excel table would also be useful, but these data types are not supported.

• Boolean
• Date
• Number
• Text

Summary

When you look at the subcategories for most of the above groups, it’s easy to see how the MicroData specification is of value, especially the Local Business category. For example, the properties in Local Business provide more markup opportunities for your local SEO strategy.

However, the lack of definition in the Product category makes this a less-than-compelling tool for those firms that sell brick and mortar products through their websites.

At first, I thought it was a built-in spell checking feature of the browser, but after seeing additional reports and then seeing it myself last night, it seems to me to be a new feature Google is testing.

Here is a screen shot of it in action:

I’ve had several other people confirm Google was showing them this red squiggly line for this search query last night. This morning, I am no longer seeing it.

I received a report on this from an anonymous reader, saying he is seeing it for other search queries. He showed me some brand searches, all spelled correctly, but Google showing it as a spelling mistake by showing the red squiggly line underneath it.

Again, this is not a browser spell checking feature, it was Google adding spell checking to the search box.

I asked Google to confirm this and have yet to hear back.

Postscript: Alex Hall commented, noting that Google has added a background image at google.com/images/experiments/wavy-underline.png which is the exact same color and wave of the underline we reported above. This is just one more piece of evidence that this is indeed a Google test.

Google’s “Best Guess” About Sexual Orientations

Here’s an example of one of the answers that were being shown, in response to a search for is anna paquin gay:

You can see that Google provided a direct answer: “Best guess for Anna Paquin Sexual orientation is Bisexual.” This worked for Paquin and other some other celebrities up until a few hours ago, when Google disabled these types of answers.

Google & Direct Answers

Google has been providing direct answers to questions based on content it finds across the web since May 2010, and it shifted toward saying “Best Guess” as part of the format in March of this year. Our posts below, as well as Google’s own from May 2010, explain more:

• Google Squared Powers Answer Sources & Something Different Refinements
• Google Goes Beyond Answers, Starts Guessing Release Dates

The answers seem to have been most noticed in categories like movie and video game release dates, but they weren’t limited to that. One category of answers had been, for some time Google tells me, the sexual orientation of people.

Sexual Orientation Answers Became More Noticeable

Why has this suddenly stopped? I haven’t gotten a straight (no pun intended) answer to that. Google just gave me this general statement:

Since May 2010, our algorithms analyze the top ranked results for a search and extract best guesses for an answer to fact-seeking queries, such as the [height of the empire state building] or [catherine zeta-jones birth date]. Because we show best guesses for facts that are available throughout the web, there is a “Show sources” link that lists several different sites that help corroborate the answer.

We’re always experimenting with ways to algorithmically provide answers to different queries, and in cases where we’re not confident that the way the answer is presented to our users is helpful, we may change how those results are displayed. We’re constantly looking to improve the quality of our results and the way they’re presented, and we welcome users’ feedback.

However, Google did say it might be that more people had started discovering the sexual orientation responses recently due of a change in how they were triggered.

Before, you were more likely to only get them if you were to search for someone along with the words “sexual orientation.” But recently (exactly how recent, Google wouldn’t say), searching in a question format along with words like “gay” might trigger it.

In other words, relatively few people were searching for “anna paquin sexual orientation” and seeing the direct answer. But many more were searching for “is anna paquin gay” — indeed, so many that Google suggests it as a search term:

It seems that giving direct answers to more common ways to search for sexual orientation questions got them noticed. Indeed, that’s what set me into looking into this story.

Sean Carlos of Antezeta Web Marketing tipped us to an Advocate article from yesterday, which cited a Tulsa marketing blog spotting the answers.

Gawker picked that up, and Manhunt Daily captured a series of responses about actors ranging from Hugh Jackman (Straight) to Angelina Jolie (Bisexual) to Jodie Foster (Lesbian) to Jesse Tyler Ferguson (Gay).

Too Sensitive For Guesses?

Here’s another example, this time for Enrique Iglesias, a screenshot that Sean Carlos captured. It shows you how the answers looked inline with the search query:

As I said, a few hours ago when I started looking into this, I could get these to trigger. But now that no longer happens. As Google won’t say why, I’ll offer my own best guess. It was probably deemed too sensitive.

At a time when the search engine has already been taking heat over what it should or shouldn’t be listing in a search for Rick Santorum, Google probably decided it didn’t want to be the one accused of outing some celebrity, even if it gathered those answers from sources across the web.

Action buttons give you quick links to perform specific actions on specific web sites. IF you are searching for an airline, the Bing action buttons may include items like check flight status, book a flight or check in to a flight. If you are searching for a car rental company, Bing may offer you action links to rent a car, find locations or contact the company. If you are searching for a hotel, Bing may offer you action links to book a room, locations and their reward program.

Here are some pictures:

Deepak Vijaywargi, Program Manager at Bing said:

Based on how people search, our algorithms now determine top actions and corresponding links in the site for a given category with high precision. For instance, with airlines the top 3 tasks are: check-in to a flight, check the status of a flight or book a flight. For software sites, if you are searching for a specific product you likely want to download it. For car rental agencies, you’d like to rent a car, find out locations or contact them.

This news come shortly after Google launched Google Flights with a booking option that is unclear if it is paid or not.

Related Stories:

• Bing Gets More Personal With Adaptive Search
• Bing Maps The Mall
• Confirmed: Bing Tests Ads Within Organic Search Results
• Google Travel Search Takes Flight With First ITA Travel Product
• Microsoft Makes Mobile Bing More Social Too
• Schema.org: Google, Bing & Yahoo Unite To Make Search Listings Richer Through Structured Data

It seems a lot like Google’s previous query feature but supposedly, it goes well beyond just the previous query.

Bing said the “more you search, the more Bing can learn” and thus adapts the search results for YOU based on your past searches – not just your immediate previous search.

Here is a video that explains it, we hope to have more information on this new feature soon:

Note, it is rolling out slowly over the next few days in the US.

Stefan from Bing added at the session that the adaptive previous queries are cookie based, and last for 28 days. And any content available in an individual’s Search History can be used to personalize the search experience. This is currently limited to the past 28 days if the individual is not signed in to Bing, or 18 months if they are. More details on search history are available here.

We should be getting started at the top of the hour, so feel free to refresh and/or come back to follow along with the discussion.

Chris Sherman and Danny Sullivan will be taking care of duties guiding the conversation. Chris has just introduced Eli and we’re beginning with what I guess will be a short speech/presentation of sorts.

Eli: I want to talk about the moral consequences of personalization. He quotes Mark Zuckerberg as saying, “A squirrel dying in front of your house today might be more relevant to you than people dying in Africa.” He wants to talk about the impact of that kind of view of relevance.

He noticed one day that updates from his conservative friends were no longer appearing in his Facebook news feed. He’s liberal-leaning, but likes to read the thoughts of his friends who think differently.

Says he did an experiment asking several friends to Google “Egypt” and send a screenshot of what they see. Shows a side-by-side comparison. “Scott” got all sorts of information about the Democratic revolutions, news about the protests, etc. But “Daniel” didn’t get any of that — he got tips about seeing the pyramids and other travel-related links.

“Increasingly, the web is showing us what it thinks we want to see. It’s not showing us what we need to see, or the world as it is.”

Quotes Eric Schmidt: “It will be hard for people to watch or consume something that has not been tailored for them.”

The “filter bubble” concept — you don’t choose what gets in your filter bubble and, more importantly, you don’t know what’s been edited out.

Personalization algorithms typically look at what you click first. On the Internet, code is the new gatekeeper. It’s making value decisions, but it doesn’t have any value system built in. “It may be showing us what we like, but it’s not showing us what matters.”

We need to make sure that these algorithms don’t focus on a very narrow definition of relevance, where relevance is defined by what we click first. It needs to look at what really matters, things that challenge us, other points of view. The Internet needs to be that thing that connects us to new ways of thinking — that’s not going to happen if we’re all stuck in a little personalized bubble of one.

And that ends his brief speech, and now Danny and Chris are going to chat with him.

DS: Do you find that there’s commonality between search engines?

EP: Says there are some searches that results are common across search engines. Mentions an appearance on a radio show when he was promoting his book. Two of three listeners got same results for “Barack Obama” search, but third got different results focused on the birth certificate issue.

DS: Do people think that everyone should get the same results?

EP: When I was going around, people were shocked that the results aren’t the same for everybody.

CS: Marissa Mayer originally said personalization was very subtle – people wouldn’t notice it at all. She also said it would surface a lot of long-tail pages. And she said that it would only be tied to the individual’s personal history. Is that what’s going on now?

EP: It’s hard to say in any given case what the algorithm is doing. It’s so complex that we don’t know why it’s doing what it does. For some people, it may be subtle. “Overall, I think Google undersells how significant it is. I don’t think Google has malicious motives in doing this. They genuinely think personalized search results will get people coming back to their search engine more. I think they also see this as a way to make it more difficult to deliberately game the results.”

One of the areas where personalization is very strong is vanity searches for your own name. The more you do it, the more the results change.

DS: Don’t you think the bubble gets popped a bit if you democratic site — they might link over to Republican sites and such. Doesn’t that mitigate the personalization?

EP: The more you click around, you may get exposed to other ideas. But you never know when you’re in the bubble. Yahoo personalizes news headlines based on your Yahoo profile, but you never know when that happens.

If it was easier to see when and how these filters are being applied, and be able to turn them on and off, it would be easier to stop them from imposing themselves on you.

CS: This raises a control issue. Should Google be the ones controlling this? Is Google becoming something like a utility that should be regulated?

EP: I think it raises these important questions. The algorithm determines how a billion plus people get where they’re going, but there’s no opacity. The New York Times has an ombudsman for oversight, but there’s nothing similar for Google.

The engineers say that most people don’t understand all this, and Google doesn’t want to make things too complicated.

From a regulatory standpoint, I think there needs to be a reset about the rules on personalization because they were written in 1977.

(Missed question Danny asked about political ads on TV and, I think, disclosure on those ads compared to Internet?)

CS: Wants to go back to discussion of tools. Google offers a variety of tools that show what data it has, but not how it’s being used. Google says this is the “secret sauce” and they can’t reveal too much.

EP: I think the Google Dashboard is a start. It’s not super obvious what Google knows about you, though – it’s a bunch of links. I think Google thinks about this stuff more than other companies, though.

The real challenge is around inferences. Few people realize, if you have a few pieces of data, how far you can extrapolate beyond those pieces of data you can to run ads. If Google is able to target based on inferred data, you should be able to see what’s being inferred about you. Google will show you what it literally knows about you. (He doesn’t say it, but he’s implying that Google won’t reveal what it infers about you.)

It’s not just literally what data you hand over, it’s also about the inferences that your haven’t told anyone about. He mentions Hunch and some of the inferences it can make based on the data users give it.

DS: Asks about the Amazon approach where users can dismiss recommendations. Is that what Google should be doing?

EP: I think Google should give people the tools to understand and play with personalization. See how personalization affects certain queries. “When they want to, these companies are amazingly good at helping people make sense at complex data. Those talents haven’t been turned on this topic.”

Google people say they don’t get many complaints from people about personalization. I tell them that very few people even know about it.

CS: You’re talking to a group of marketers. They rely on this personalization for targeting. So what would you say to them about balance?

EP: My position isn’t that personalization is bad overall, it’s that we need to be careful about how it’s done. Google could do a lot more to explain its philosophy about this, without making it super easy to boost your search rankings. People need to be able to decide when they use these tools.

And with that, the conversation is over. Thanks for following along!

Enterprise search engines are well-versed with named entity extraction tools and techniques, which is how this information has been generated in the past decade.

The major search engines are essentially telling content providers that if they name all their entities in their content, they can do a better job of extracting meaning from them to help improve search results. This is a win-win proposition, right? Maybe!

Other similar initiatives known as the Semantic Web and RDFa have not made much inroads in the mindshare of business owners yet. In fact, business owners have a hard time staying on top of current SEO markup practices associated with standard HTML tags.

Will this format gain traction among businesses? I hope so, but there are a number of hurdles that stand in the way at the moment.

Here are some challenges for moving this technology forward. Some are technical, some are not.

• This technology represents a real cost to implement, and the decision to spend those dollars are usually made by the senior marketing executive. In fact, it is very likely that most marketers at any level do not understand the relationship between the various micro-tag technologies and improved search results. There is no real educational strategy in place to promote this specification, and the PR machine is not going to get the job done.

• A second hurdle is the enormous amount of content that is currently deployed on the Web. It would be a herculean task to go back and reprocess this content. Since the value proposition is not well understood by marketing executives, this reprocessing is not going to happen in any meaningful way for some time. In fact, even if the value proposition was well understood, it’s not clear that the cost of processing hundreds of millions of documents is worth the cost.

• The presentation of information at Schema.Org was written by technologist for technologists. Nowhere is there a clear statement of benefits, or a call to action targeted at the real decision maker who happens to be the CMO – not the CTO.

• The hierarchal presentation of entities and related information is hard to review at Schema.org – it’s not apparent that there are only two parent nodes (level-1) with seven child nodes (level-2) at first glance. This information really needs to be repurposed to make it easy to access, and understood by non-technologist decision makers.

• The sale of products and services is at the heart of every B2B/B2C website doing business on Internet. I was surprised at how few product properties there are and that there are no sub-categories at all for the Products category. Maybe this is being worked on, but it is a serious flaw in the MicroData specification. There is a well developed set of business categories, but in most cases these will be too high-level.

For example, a site tagged as an Office Equipment Store implies that it sells office equipment, but this category does not have properties to describe a primary product or multiple products.

Further, the Product category does not have a defined product taxonomy such as those found in the office supplies category at Amazon.

Going forward, I think business owners can be motivated to start marking up new content if they are presented with real examples of why this format is important. But first, the product category needs to be fleshed out to meet the needs of business owners.

Both Yahoo and Google are using similar in-house technology (SearchMonkey and Rich Snippets) to enhance search results in very meaningful ways – this is an excellent use of the technology, but most marketing professionals do not make the connection between these enhanced search results and the new Microdata initiative.

The bottomline is that businesses sell products and they want to sell more products. Their ability to markup their products is limited with the current specification.

I think this is a great idea, the specification needs to be fleshed out, and the sponsors of this initiative need to do a better job of explaining this technology and its benefits to marketing executives. Perhaps these are improvements that are in the works.

Next time, in part two of this article, I will provide a detailed review of the functionality, and how the MicroData specification can be of practical use to marketing executives when thinking about their website strategies.