Do HTML5 elements mean anything to search engines?

Let me just say first that I'm not looking to start a flame war :-)

I'm aware of the semantic meaning that tags such as <article> give a document, but what benefits does one get from using them?

Do search engines look at them differently? If not, what other benefits are there开发者_StackOverflow社区?

A Q+A on Google's Webmaster Central seems to suggest that the new HTML5 semantic elements have no impact currently, but will at some point in the future:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=2d4592cbb613e42c&hl=en

There are the obvious benefits that one day search engines might use them or microdata to associate more meaning to your site. I'm not totaly sure if that is the case yet, but some of the other answers so far provide some good links to answer that question.

Another benefit is cleaner markup. It helps to clean up the div soup that solved so many of our organization issues with HTML 4.01. Take this example:

<div class="post">
<h1>Example Blog Post</h1>
   <div class="entry">
      <p>Blog text goes here...</p>
   </div>
   <div class="entryFooter">
      <p> Posted in example category.</p>
   </div>
</div>

is not as readable or as clean as:

<article>
   <header>
      <h1>Example Blog Post</h1>
   </header>
   <p>Blog text goes here...</p>
   <footer>
      <p>Posted in example category.</p>
   </footer>
</article>

Cleaner markup will make maintaining the markup a lot easier and that is always a benefit in my opinion.

Search engines will certainly look at Microdata differently.

Here's a tool that parses microdata: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

To learn more about HTML5 Microdata: http://diveintohtml5.ep.io/extensibility.html