In an effort to help its users find what they're looking for more quickly, Google has been employing rich snippets. These short summaries of web page content sit beneath each link to search results and give users more information before they click through. In some cases, though, this data could mislead the unwary.
Barry Schwartz revealed this recently in an article for Search Engine Land. He noted that in late April, Google began offering a rich snippet markup for prayer times. For the non-Orthodox and uninitiated, very religious Jews and Muslims are duty-bound multiple times a day to stop what they are doing and pray. What times they are required to do this varies with their geographical location.
This can be a problem for religiously observant world travelers. One of the men I'm privileged to call a friend is an Orthodox Jewish lawyer who is heavily involved with broadband and Internet issues. On business, he has visited places to which I can only dream of traveling, such as Singapore. I know that he continued his regular prayers while there, but not at the same times he would have prayed at his eastern United States office!
So you would think that rich snippets for prayer times would be – you should forgive the expression – a blessing. As with many areas where religion and technology cross paths, though, it's not quite that simple. Schwartz examined Google's technical documentation for rich snippets for prayer times, and noted that “it says 'prayer times format can be used by any religious organization' but the markup gives us no way to specify if it is Jewish, Islamic or another religion.”
If Google doesn't give you some way to tell it in the markup which religion your prayer times are for, how does it know which one to display when someone searches for “Jewish prayer times [geographical location]” versus “Islamic prayer times [geographical location]”? The truth is, it doesn't. All it does is hope that the pages returned for prayer times in a particular city rank for the correct religion. In other words, they let not God, but the algorithm sort it out. And unlike God, the algorithm is not infallible.
Schwartz discovered this as the result of certain experiments he performed. Testing out the prayer times rich text snippets, for him, became part of a larger online project to create content management systems useful for shuls and synagogues. And oy! Did he have some mishegoss to deal with!
Google Optimization 
