Bizarre problem with Google's Rich Snippets Testing Tool

Question

I'm currently experiencing the weirdest problem with Google's Rich Snippets Testing Tool. It kept throwing up warnings for my website which didn't make sense, so I pulled all of the structured markup out of my page to do some testing:

The following (based on Google's examples) works perfectly: the 'Google search preview' section displays the result with a snippet. See example here.

So I took the working example, and replaced the dummy details with my own. I was amazed to find that it didn't work! I'm told by the app that it has "Insufficient data to generate the preview". See example here.

So (after lots more testing and banging my head against the wall) I try using the original (working) snippet in example 1, and replace one field at a time. I only got as far as the first 'name' field, and it broke! What's wrong with my name Google? See example here.

I'm really confused by this, what's up? I noticed that if I change my name to "Row Manni" (the same character length as "Bob Smith" in the example), then it does work.

Has anybody experienced anything similar? If so, how did you solve it, and if not, what do I do next?

Thank you

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Edit 2011-01-19:

After changing to use vcard (on comment suggestion) I ran a few more tests and I get exactly the same result. These tests are available here (not working - uses my full name) and here (working - using truncated names).

I can't for the life of me work out what's wrong here! If their testing tool isn't working correctly, does their search detect rich snippets in the same way, and is this broken too? I'm leaving the microformats in my page now, but I'd still really like to pursue this for my own interest (and sanity!).

I've cross-posted on the Google webmaster forums (as mentioned in the comments) to see if they pick it up. You can view the thread here.

Answer 1

It's a "bug":

If name itemprop="name"' (with or without spaces, case-insensitive) matches a substring of the domain, then this error is generated:

Insufficient data to generate the preview.

your domain "dev.rowanmanning.co.uk" contains "Rowan Manning" [minus the space]

try changing your name to: "Rowan Something Manning" and see if it works.

TEST CASES:

fails:

• domain: rutledge.com
• name: ru t l e d g e . co
• test link

fails:

• domain: jpwco.org
• name: jpw co
• test link

succeeds:

• domain: jpwco.org
• name: not_jpwco
• test link

Names also expected to fail: "co" "uk" "ning" "dev.r owan".

ps. "name" match to the path part of the URL (after the domain) will not yield the error. IE: http://jpwco.com/stack/dev.rowanmanning.co.uk/test3.html succeeds, with the name "Rowan Manning".

Bizarre indeed.