So I'm doing a little vanity search on the G-machine for my 'chrisbward' moniker and I come accross this;

It seems that google are now presenting some kind of embedded data into the SERPs!

About two summers ago I would have been in a drive to promote Microformats and/vs. the W3C's Semantic Web... and after a quick rightclick-viewsource, turns out the page in question uses hReview-aggregate model to embed semantic information based on the ratings.

It's unlikely that building stuff like this will improve your rankings in the search engines, it will certainly help the presentation of your results - and that will ultimately lead to more user confidence, click throughs and conversions, right?

I called it a long time ago, but Microformats, inherently, are not the way forward and will cause more problems than good in the future, but for the moment, as evidenced above - they work and they're pretty easy to implement.

Looking into how Google are doing this, it seems that they are indexing both Microformats and RDFa statements... with plenty of examples.

Personally, I'd recommend the RDFa flavour, and now is the time with XHTML 1.1 + RDFa (final) and HTML5 + RDFa (working draft) DTDs now out there.

chris.