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.

I used to be a big fan of the idea of schema.org, but it seems to be used by Google to keep as much traffic as possible on Google properties.

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.

> Standards that help combat vertically integrated monopolies seems like something HN readers would be in favor of.

This. You can pretty much think of schema.org as "The Semantic Web - The Good Parts". It's not a literal description of course (there's plenty of potentially worthwhile 'semantics' that isn't covered there) but it's in the ballpark. And the best part is that sites are incented to be truthful wrt. their machine readable info, because they might get banned/downranked by the major search engines otherwise. So everyone benefits.

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.

Everyone serious about recipes has it you wont rank without it

So it seems Google might have created the problem that they're solving: sites have to be full of reams of mainly useless content to rank, then Google pulls out the useful stuff and displays it in search.

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.

Its a worthwhile goal if you intend to make money, rather than donating free information to Google.

You've just succumbed to the X/Y problem. If you "intend to make money", then that is your goal—not the measure of your traffic, and not your ability to stick it the man or whomever you consider to be your competitor. The parent commenter is right; there is no intrinsic value in the measures that you keep invoking. The unrelenting focus on those auxiliary details—to the exclusion of the real goal—is the basis of Goodhart's law.

Yes. This seems very transparently a way for google to hijack customers trying to get to your site for shipping status.

The error is in believing that people are "trying to get to your site". Be real. What people are trying to do is "get their shipping status".

If you want to say that eliminating steps and allowing people to get what they want without having to go through your site means that you lose the opportunity to push other sales on them or something, then okay, fine, make that argument. But be honest about it, and don't try to frame things as if your foremost concern is for what the people want, instead of what it really is—which is trying to optimize for conditions that are best for you, the party that the people are otherwise made to deal with.

I think the danger is that it's "control creep", Google collect so much information that no one needs your website.

Then Google offer a way for people to buy your products simply. Then they prioritise your competitors that use Google's offering because it's simpler for the user. Then you have to use Google to sell your products too. Then the price goes up or you get removed from the listings for some arbritary reason with no support.

Yes, they want shipping status. I don't dispute that. But maybe I have adjacent info that's helpful, like return instructions, or what to do if there's damage, shipping status for other active orders, or "how to configure" info, etc. And Google will take it farther and shift future potential sales to places that they can monetize. Taking away all of the customer interactions from businesses affects their revenue and ability to deliver good service. Google is choking off small businesses. The asymmetric relationship isn't sustainable. Google benefits a lot from scraping all this info and returns little.

>> Yes. This seems very transparently a way for google to hijack customers trying to get to your site for shipping status.

> If you want to say that eliminating steps and allowing people to get what they want without having to go through your site means that you lose the opportunity to push other sales on them or something, then okay, fine, make that argument. But be honest about it, and don't try to frame things as if your foremost concern is for what the people want, instead of what it really is—which is trying to optimize for conditions that are best for you, the party that the people are otherwise made to deal with.

If we're going to be honest, we have to frame this as Google trying to grab an opportunity to push other sales on users, not as a them trying to get people what they want faster.

And while we're being honest, we also have to acknowledge that Google is already extraordinarily powerful (as shown by the assumption that "eliminating steps" means "eliminating non-Google interactions"), and giving them this kind of data only makes them more so.

Agreed. I removed all of the micro data from the sites I manage for this reason.

Schema doesn't seem to have any benefit to anyone but Google.

I am going to respectfully disagree with you. Sure, Google and other corporate backers of schema.org are acting in their own self interests. However, having machine readable metadata is a rising tide that floats all boats. I fail to see how small businesses are prevented from using metadata.

There is a lot of valid criticism of large tech companies like G and FB. However, it is up to us as individuals to control our own use of technologies, limit ourselves in our interaction and data sharing. Off topic, but I am a happy customer of freedom.to that lets me place what are effectively parental controls on my own use of social media and other digital time wasters.

Digital media is dehumanizing unless used very sparingly. I use G and FB services but in a very controlled way for what I think is my own benefit, not theirs.

> I fail to see how small businesses are prevented from using metadata

Your answer misses the point, which is that microdata and co profit Google first and foremost who are extracting information from 3rd parties and displaying that information on their own website or crunching them for various purposes without giving back web traffic or a cent.

Implementing micro data on public facing websites isn't cost free.

> Your answer misses the point

Sorry, but the claim was this:

> Schema doesn't seem to have any benefit to anyone but Google

If that's not "the point", then the comment shouldn't have suggested that it was.

> Sorry, but the claim was this:

> > Schema doesn't seem to have any benefit to anyone but Google

I think the key word is "seem" here. Hypothetically, microdata could help other companies - but I don't know of any that use it.

If I have an e-commerce website that sells personalised hats and I add the shipping info microdata to it, who is going to use that other than google?

Duckduckgo has a shopping tab too (although, it's not as functional and comprehensive as googles, in my experience). If there's adoption of the schemas, I'd guess all the shopling crawler sites will use the data.

If you expect to show up generally favorably in a shopping comparison, having shipping data available would seem to be useful, since people may not want to purchase without an idea of when they'd get the items.

Of course, if you don't get purchases through those channels now, adding shipping data probably won't help.

> who is going to use that other than google?

Uh... the human on the other end that Google is relaying the information to...

I don't think anyone would disagree with the statement "if you rely on Google to obtain all your users, you need to do everything you can to help Google"

However, we're in a comment thread that went

> > Schema doesn't seem to have any benefit to anyone but Google.

> I fail to see how small businesses are prevented from using metadata.

The only use case I can think of for small businesses is scraping your rivals and seeing what they're getting up to.

The Google info box shows Google is perfectly happy to take content, uncredited, and deny your site clicks.

No point enabling that behavior for site owners.

Helps keep Linked Data somewhat relevant, at least.

Works for recipes and products - which schema did you remove?

"Since June 2020, retailers have been able to list their products across different Google surfaces for free, including on Google Search."

So now I can [verbed] surface a [Google] surface on my [Microsoft] Surface while sitting on my [kitchen counter] surface.

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

For those who don't get the linguistics reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...

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?

It makes their data more accurate, and they can better train their models to identify data unstructured data on all sorts of sites.