Search is an unholy mess. Even with advances from Google and others that represent quantum leaps over the days when HotBot and AltaVista sat atop the heap, search is still a frustrating and inefficient way to find what you’re looking for. Say you’re going to Sausalito and you want to find some reviews of hotels in the seaside town. So you hit Google and type in Sausalito, hotel and reviews. The results are a hodgepodge of pages that include reviews along with some that just include the word somewhere on the page.

That’s why, once I was able to understand it, the notion of XML seemed so exciting. If the travel industry agreed that the tag review would be used for reviews, then any computer parsing the code would recognize it as such, making it easy to separate out reviews from other content.

It’s working within the confines of XML specifications that have been adopted, but it’s not widespread enough to help the average person (that is, me) find just what I’m looking for. And, to complicate matters, there are now between 20 and 40 million blogs out there with with tons of great content that’s just as hard to sift through despite the great work being done by the various blog search engines.

At the Syndicate conference in San Francisco this week, Marc Canter of Broadband Mechanics introduced an initiative to do something about it. Called Structured Blogging, it involves using a standard form for blog entries that will help identify the nature of the entry and make it reusable based on whatever somebody is looking for. What that means, as far as I understand it (which may not be very far), a post of a movie review on your blog would look like any other post to your blog, but somebody retrieving all movie reviews would find them in a standard, common format.

Here’s how it’s explained on the initiative’s website:

These styles and tags ensure that movie and book reviews don’t look like calendar or journal entries, and that each content type can be quickly recognized and processed by automated search services and other applications. Woven into the HTML of a blog post, this information travels with it through syndication feeds, readers, and aggregators. Ultimately, it can even be converted out to other formats our Structured Blogging tools support such as RDF in XML.

Here’s one scenario describing the extent of the potential for Structured Blogging, described by Pamela Parker at ClickZ:

You’re a marketer at a retail operation specializing in the latest fitness gear and apparel. You want to run a campaign promoting a sale you’re having on Saucony Grid Hurricane running shoes. So, you pull up your content management application. You select “offer to sell” from a drop-down box. Up pops a list of fields, which you fill in, one by one. You make selections for item type, brand, price, colors, sizes, etc. You hit “publish.” It appears on your company’s Web site. You wait.

Meanwhile, a fitness content site is collecting offers to display in its “classifieds” section. Someone has asked to be alerted if Saucony Grid Hurricane shoes, in a women’s size 8.5, are offered below $90. That person gets a notification—perhaps on her instant messenger application—and a sale results.

So far, the “microcontent types” defined by the initiative include reviews, events, lists, media (audio, video, images), and people and group showcases.

The initiative has some interesting participants, including PubSub (one of my favorite RSS tools), Bloglines, Feedster, SocialText, Rojo and Xanga, to name just a few.

So far, Structured Blogging plugins are available for WordPress and Moveable Type.

It didn’t take long for some people to throw cold water on the notion. Paul Kedrosky says it’ll never gain traction because people are too lazy to take the extra steps needed to apply it. Over at Corante, Stowe Boyd expects dozens of reasons for shrugging it off will emerge in the months ahead. I’ve also heard some criticism that suggests it’s an effort by a few to wrest control of the uncontrollable blogosphere.

I see two reasons why it could succeed, though. First, if the benefits are strong enough—that is, we fall in love with the kind of search results it gives us. This applies both to those doing the searching and to those (like many of us bloggers) who want our stuff to be found. Second, if all of the blogging applications make it dead easy by integrating it into their publishing interfaces, then those of us who want our stuff to be found more easily will have an added incentive. After all, many of us take the extra step to tag or categorize our entries when we don’t have to.

In any case, it’ll be interesting to watch the initiative unfold. There’s an associated blog that’s already listing reactions, as well as a restricted-access wiki where details are emerging.