hProduct parsers and crawlers, rejoice — there is an even better reason to use bby.com shop URLs… if you knew what they were. A while back, a forward-thinking gentleman had the insight to put these human-readable URLs on the site, which deliver a result set of products, based on term. Now that an experimental version of hProduct has made it out to the site on some pages, it could be a nice asset for people to use.

In simple terms, a query looks like this:
http://www.bestbuy.com/shop/term

Some examples:
http://www.bestbuy.com/shop/cartman
http://www.bestbuy.com/shop/eee

More complex example with additional search parameters:
http://www.bestbuy.com/shop/tv+samsung+1080p

No matter how you feel about the hListing vs. hProduct argument, or Microformats in general, I’m always excited to see experimentation with new and existing Microformats across the web. In an experimental move, we are adding hProduct to all search result, listing pages (faceted navigation), and “shop URLs” (http://www.bestbuy.com/shop/term) on the site with a pre-holiday code deployment.

Admittedly, there is still much work to be done. The source is only a little closer to being truly human-readable, and there are always those “other” things: UI/UX considerations, business “needs”, poor data, and non-semantic markup welded to critical back-end files. In order to get to a better place with hProduct and semantics, I have a personal agenda:

• Get closer to POSH templates with front-end template refresh
• Recognize and perform data cleanup operations, and start teaching out the importance of clean data
• Deploy fuller, more complete hProduct to product detail pages

All this being said, within the confines of this big corporate machine, it feels like progress… or at least a cool experiment that we happened to sneak in without anyone seeing.