Make a topical search engine with schema.org types

Imagine that you have a website about movies. You might want your visitors to be able to search from your website for pages about movies, either among your affiliated websites or the web as a whole. By using schema.org types with your search engine to create a topical search engine, you can do just that.

A topical search engine returns results which include the kind of content you are looking for, as stated by the results’ webmasters. As a result, if one of your visitors uses your topical movie search engine to search for The Internship, you can be sure the results are about the 2013 film and not about potential career opportunities. If you want to learn more about schema.org, see What is schema.org? below.

To setup your search engine to use Schema.org Types:

1. From the list of search engines, select the search engine you want to edit.
2. Under Overview, scroll down to Search features. Click on "All search features settings".
3. Under Search Features, scroll down to Page restricts.
4. Under Restrict pages using schema.org types, enter up to 10 schema types you want to include. As you enter text into the field, a dropdown suggests schema.org types for you. Note that schema types are in a nested structure, so if you use a type like CreativeWork, it will also include results that are sub-Types of CreativeWork, such as Book or Movie.  For a full list of types, see schema.org. 
5. If you want your search engine to find schema types across the entire web, configure your search engine to search the entire web. Otherwise, your search engine will return results only from your Sites to search that match at least one of the schema types you specified.

What is schema.org?

Schema.org is an effort to provide webmasters with HTML to mark up content in ways that are recognized by major search providers, including Google. For example, the webmaster of a site about movies can use the schema type “Movie,” and then properties such as “director” or “genre” in the HTML of their site. Search providers can use that data to better understand the content on that page in search results.