echwa.com

Google have been testing for many months a feed of data from Twitter combined with increased crawl rate for trusted news and blog posting sources (such as the Huffington Post) and have announced today at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA that they have now struck deals with both Facebook and MySpace to leverage their data feeds too.

This of course follows their announcement today that Google are now supporting real time search in earnest worldwide – here is a video about it and here is a link to real-time ‘Obama’ information:

Also announced today is that Google Trends is now out of Beta and is prime time, try it out today along with the improved Hot Searches feature.

Back in May this year the Google Webmaster Central blog announced that Google had rolled out support for what they termed ‘rich snippets‘ and further define as samples of content. This support for showing additional data in their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) is based on using Microformats and RDFa structured data.

Today, a Googler has linked in the Microformats Discussion group a new tool within Google Webmaster Tools that allows webmasters to “check that their markup is being correctly parsed by Google for use
in Rich Snippets”. Try the tool out today by visiting it at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

A couple points to note up front (from Kavi’s post at http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss):
- Currently Rich Snippets supports hCard, hReview, hReview-aggregate, and hProduct. Other microformats may not be recognized by the tool.
- Google don’t currently support the include pattern.

This new tool does not appear to be available in the main Webmaster Tools navigation just yet.