Introducing schema.org: Search engines come together for a richer web

(Cross-posted on the Inside Search Blog)

Today we’re announcing schema.org, a new initiative from Google, Bing and Yahoo! to create and support a common vocabulary for structured data markup on web pages. With schema.org, site owners and developers can learn about structured data and improve how their sites appear in major search engines. The site aims to be a one stop resource for webmasters looking to add markup to their pages.

Search engines have been working independently to support structured markup for a few years now. We introduced rich snippets to Google search in 2009 to help people find better summaries of reviews and people, and since that time we’ve expanded to new kinds of rich snippets, including recipes and events. We’ve been thrilled to see content creators across the web—from stubhub.com to allrecipes.com—add markup to their pages, and today we’re able to show rich snippets in search results more than 10 times as often as when we started two years ago.

We want to continue making the open web richer and more useful. We know that it takes time and effort for webmasters to add this markup to their pages, and adding markup is much harder if every search engine asks for data in a different way. That’s why we’ve come together with other search engines to support a common set of schemas, just as we came together to support a common standard for sitemaps in 2006. With schema.org, site owners can improve how their sites appear in search results not only on Google, but on Bing, Yahoo! and potentially other search engines as well in the future.

In addition to consolidating the schemas for the categories we already support, schema.org also introduces schemas for more than a hundred new categories, including movies, music, organizations, TV shows, products, places and more. As webmasters add this markup to their sites, search engines can develop richer search experiences. With webmaster feedback, we’ll be able to regularly publish new schemas for sites to use and, in turn, expand the list of queries with rich results. For webmasters who have already added microformats or RDFa currently supported by rich snippets, their sites will still appear with rich snippets on Google. You can learn more on our Webmaster Central Blog, Help Center and on schema.org.

Schema.org provides a wide variety of vocabularies webmasters can use to mark up their pages.

While this collaborative initiative is new, we draw heavily from the decades of work in the database and knowledge representation communities, from projects such as Jim Gray’s SDSS Skyserver, Cyc and from ongoing efforts such as dbpedia.org and linked data. We feel privileged to build upon this great work.

We look forward to seeing structured markup continue to grow on the web, powering richer search results and new kinds of applications.

Posted by Ramanathan Guha, Google Fellow

Ensuring your information is safe online

The Internet has been an amazing force for good in the world—opening up communications, boosting economic growth and promoting free expression. But like all technologies, it can also be used for bad things. Today, despite the efforts of Internet companies and the security community, identity theft, fraud and the hijacking of people’s email accounts are common problems online.

Bad actors take advantage of the fact that most people aren’t that tech savvy—hijacking accounts by using malware and phishing scams that trick users into sharing their passwords, or by using passwords obtained by hacking other websites. Most account hijackings are not very targeted; they are designed to steal identities, acquire financial data or send spam. But some attacks are targeted at specific individuals.

Through the strength of our cloud-based security and abuse detection systems*, we recently uncovered a campaign to collect user passwords, likely through phishing. This campaign, which appears to originate from Jinan, China, affected what seem to be the personal Gmail accounts of hundreds of users including, among others, senior U.S. government officials, Chinese political activists, officials in several Asian countries (predominantly South Korea), military personnel and journalists.

The goal of this effort seems to have been to monitor the contents of these users’ emails, with the perpetrators apparently using stolen passwords to change peoples’ forwarding and delegation settings. (Gmail enables you to forward your emails automatically, as well as grant others access to your account.)

Google detected and has disrupted this campaign to take users’ passwords and monitor their emails. We have notified victims and secured their accounts. In addition, we have notified relevant government authorities.

It’s important to stress that our internal systems have not been affected—these account hijackings were not the result of a security problem with Gmail itself. But we believe that being open about these security issues helps users better protect their information online.

Here are some ways to improve your security when using Google products:

• Enable 2-step verification. This Gmail feature uses a phone and second password on sign-in, and it protected some accounts from this attack. So check out this video on setting up 2-step verification.

• Use a strong password for Google that you do not use on any other site. Here’s a video to help.
• Enter your password only into a proper sign-in prompt on a https://www.google.com domain. We will never ask you to email your password or enter it into a form that appears within an email message. Here’s a video with more advice.
• Check your Gmail settings for suspicious forwarding addresses (“Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab, Fig. 1) or delegated accounts (“Accounts” tab, Fig. 2).

Fig. 1

 Fig. 2

• Watch for the red warnings about suspicious account activity that may appear on top of your Gmail inbox.
• Review the security features offered by the Chrome browser. If you don’t already use Chrome, consider switching your browser to Chrome.
• Explore other security recommendations and a video with tips on how to stay safe across the web.

Please spend ten minutes today taking steps to improve your online security so that you can experience all that the Internet offers—while also protecting your data.

*We also relied on user reports and this external report to uncover the campaign described.

Posted by Eric Grosse, Engineering Director, Google Security Team

The +1 button for websites: recommend content across the web

Since we started rolling out the +1 button in March, you’ve been able to recommend content to your friends and contacts directly from Google search results and ads.

But sometimes you want to +1 a page while you’re on it. After all, how do you know you want to suggest that recipe for chocolate flan if you haven’t tried it out yet?

Today, we’re releasing +1 buttons to the whole web. As a result, you might start seeing +1 appear on sites large and small across the Internet. We’ve partnered with a few sites where you’ll see +1 buttons in the near future:

You'll also start to see +1 buttons on other Google properties such as Android Market, Blogger, Product Search and YouTube.

+1 is as simple on the rest of the web as it is on Google search. With a single click you can recommend that raincoat, news article or favorite sci-fi movie to friends, contacts and the rest of the world. The next time your connections search, they could see your +1’s directly in their search results, helping them find your recommendations when they’re most useful.

In the meantime, we’re continuing to roll out the +1 button for English-language searches on Google.com. If you want to +1 search results and search ads earlier, you can opt in through our experimental search site. To see recommendations from your friends and contacts in Google search, make sure you’re signed into your Google Account.

If you’re a webmaster, you can get the +1 button code and learn more about implementation on our +1 webmaster site.

We hope you’ll agree that +1 buttons across the web make it even easier for you to recommend content to your friends and contacts, and make search results even more helpful and relevant.

Posted by Evan Gilbert, Software Engineer, +1 Button