42% of URLs have Open Graph tags

http://blog.embed.ly/open-graph

by screeley • 14 years ago

37 11 14 years ago

blog.embed.ly

nthitz• 14 years ago

Probably not quite 42% given:

"Embedly's crawler doesn't go out looking for URLs. We only process URLs that have been shared through our API. You can then postulate that our Open Graph average is actually higher as the sites that are shared more are optimized to be shared in Facebook."

vannevar• 14 years ago

Probably not even within an order of magnitude or two. There are a lot of URLs, including the 'dark web' that doesn't get crawled.

diminish• 14 years ago

"42% of all URLs that Embedly processes have one or more Open Graph tags" is the truth; the current title is misleading.

guard-of-terra• 14 years ago

OpanGraph has numerous problems which hinder it appearing by default in HTML:

- It is verbose and bloats the page. You have a dozen of tags in the best case, but if you have an album of something you might need to provide a set of og tags for every object, which is a lot.

- You often need a different set of og tags on the same page in order to make facebook treat that page differently (you can be doing different things on the same page). So you end up serving a special version of page with og tags to facebook by user-agent.

For simplier cases, you don't even need og, and for more complicated ones, they are facebook-specific and you'll have trouble using those for anything else.

The overall experience from og and facebook: Bad. Don't like.

acdha• 14 years ago

Also: OpenGraph hates the web and cannot be embedded in any valid HTML document and XHTML validation requires using a custom DTD. I'd really like it if they'd just adopt the standard HTML5 microdata approach and avoid the need to end up bloating out <head> with a bunch of <meta> tags duplicating content found elsewhere on the page.

untog• 14 years ago

What would you propose as a replacement? I agree that it can be a pain, but I'm struggling to think of a better system.

iparamonau• 14 years ago

if 42 is the answer, is 'how many URLs have OG tags' the new ultimate question?

officialchicken• 14 years ago

The ultimate question still hasn't been answered - viewing the page source reveals NO tags with og attributes, which one would expect in the search for life, the universe, and all facebook profiles.

Danieru• 14 years ago

Actually the ultimate question has been answered, we know it is 42.

The problem is that we do not know what the ultimate question is.

ytadesse• 14 years ago

Semantics aside, this is the reason FB will own the search/discovery space in the future. That's not just a troll comment, that's fact.

FB is amassing a huge database of well organized & socially relevant online documents that other companies are going to have a hard time even coming close to. It's like PageRank on steroids.

CodeCube• 14 years ago

FB may be amassing that database today, but the OpenGraph metadata is publicly available to anyone who crawls that same page no? So what's stopping anyone else who crawls the web from using that same data (G+)?

42% of URLs have Open Graph tags

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