As an engineer doing APIs for a company that is involved in online retail, and having built shipping integrations and exported this sort of data in APIs...
This is a pretty good schema.
I was expecting something a little more naive, but there are concepts in here that I believe would let us expose everything important to Google about our shipping options. Enough to let them compute an accurate price, time, and label, at any given point in time.
Things like the cut-off time, and being able to represent which days/hours your warehouses are open is really important in this sort of thing.
The biggest threat to small sellers is Amazon. schema.org benefits sellers by making it easier to list and sell their goods elsewhere (including Google Shopping). Standards that help combat vertically integrated monopolies seems like something HN readers would be in favor of.
It seems like it has the potential to serve just about everyone but the site hosting the data.
For example, recipe sites are overwhelmed with pages and pages of generally poorly written and uninteresting background information designed to make you see as many ads as possible. However, many recipe sites added metadata with complete recipe contents, free of fluff. Sure, Google uses that to read off recipes from the Home, but there's also a python module that does the same and could be linked into a custom recipe book.
In these cases, everyone but the content producer is better off for not having to wade through junk content to find what you're looking for.
I am still a fan of it, especially when it comes to building an IT driven organization. I take it as an example for pitching a terminology repository whenever possible.
Yes, that's true. But "getting traffic" isn't really a worthwhile goal in itself, and seeing google as stealing your traffic just because they can provide information to users without a navigation hop is wrongheaded.
Making users visit your site to look up shipping status just to juice your traffic stats when you'd could provide it in a more convenient way is what everybody on this site would be calling a "dark pattern" if a big tech company did it. And just because you're small, doesn't make it any less annoying to your users.
I don't see where Google is going with Schema.org that seems to be something that's going to hurt them in the long term as it lowers the barrier to entry to scrap websites. So why are they investing in that?
[+] [-] danpalmer|5 years ago|reply
This is a pretty good schema.
I was expecting something a little more naive, but there are concepts in here that I believe would let us expose everything important to Google about our shipping options. Enough to let them compute an accurate price, time, and label, at any given point in time.
Things like the cut-off time, and being able to represent which days/hours your warehouses are open is really important in this sort of thing.
[+] [-] phpnode|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xnx|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lolinder|5 years ago|reply
For example, recipe sites are overwhelmed with pages and pages of generally poorly written and uninteresting background information designed to make you see as many ads as possible. However, many recipe sites added metadata with complete recipe contents, free of fluff. Sure, Google uses that to read off recipes from the Home, but there's also a python module that does the same and could be linked into a custom recipe book.
In these cases, everyone but the content producer is better off for not having to wade through junk content to find what you're looking for.
[+] [-] einrealist|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notatoad|5 years ago|reply
Making users visit your site to look up shipping status just to juice your traffic stats when you'd could provide it in a more convenient way is what everybody on this site would be calling a "dark pattern" if a big tech company did it. And just because you're small, doesn't make it any less annoying to your users.
[+] [-] tyingq|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reaperducer|5 years ago|reply
Schema doesn't seem to have any benefit to anyone but Google.
[+] [-] reaperducer|5 years ago|reply
So now I can [verbed] surface a [Google] surface on my [Microsoft] Surface while sitting on my [kitchen counter] surface.
[+] [-] RKearney|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] polote|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duhi88|5 years ago|reply