Search engines not only display content, they spider web pages, gathering information from your pages, then re-work all that information into a listing that searchers see when they’re looking for stuff — and the cycle is complete.

When a person goes to a search engine they have a good idea of what they’re looking for (otherwise they’re be on StumbleUpon, right?). With millions of search results being found and displayed, sometimes it’s hard for people to find what they’re looking for among all those results. To help combat that, Google is trying to show searchers more information about their search results.

Information about information? That sounds a lot like meta-data! Yes, yes it does!

Unlike the traditional title, meta-description, and meta-keywords tags that most web developers are familiar with, the meta-data that Google is utilizing exists in RDFa, Microformats, and Microdata — Microdata being Google’s preferred markup schema.

Using any of those three technologies a web developer can provide additional information about what’s on a page, even what the page is talking about: a person, a product, an event, a recipe, a product review, and more.

The rich snippet not only shows the link title, the “snippet” (a summary of the content, usually the meta-description), but, in this example of a recipe, also shows a thumbnail of the recipe, the “star-rating” including the number of reviews submitted, and how much time you need to allow for preparation and cooking. Very helpful! And you didn’t even have to navigate away from Google to find whether the information was what you were looking for.

From a usability perspective, until everyone marks up their content to take advantage of rich-snippets your content will stand out above your competition, meaning you’ll probably have better click-through results and more traffic to your site.