Yahoo, Bing and Google join up for new search project

The three search giants have joined hands and launched a new project called schema.org.

Schema.org explains that "many sites are generated from structured data, which is often stored in databases. When this data is formatted into HTML, it becomes very difficult to recover the original structured data.

Many applications, especially search engines, can benefit greatly from direct access to this structured data. On-page markup enables search engines to understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results in order to make it easier for users to find relevant information on the web.

Markup can also enable new tools and applications that make use of the structure."

Specific schemas have been developed and documented for many different types of data such as books, movies, TV programmes, local businesses, restaurants and general products.  There are also embedded 'non-text' objects for audio, video and images.