Search engines benefit greatly from direct access to Microdata because it allows them to understand the information on web pages and provide more relevant results to users.
[4] Microdata is an attempt to provide a simpler way of annotating HTML elements with machine-readable tags than the similar approaches of using RDFa and microformats.
A collection of commonly used markup vocabularies are provided by Schema.org schemas which include: Person, "Place", Event, Organization, Product, Review, Review-aggregate, Breadcrumb, Offer, Offer-aggregate.
For example, Yandex, a major search engine in Russia, supports microformats such as hCard (company contact information), hRecipe (food recipe), hReview (market reviews) and hProduct (product data) and provides its own format for definition of the terms and encyclopedic articles.
[17] The same machine-readable terms can be used not only in HTML Microdata, but also in other annotations such as RDFa or JSON-LD in the markup, or in an external RDF file in a serialization such as RDF/XML, Notation3, or Turtle.