Big Three agree to agree
p2pnet.net News:- Money talks and Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have jointly agreed it’s in their mutual best financial interests to agree on how webmasters and online publishers submit their sites’ content for indexing.
Accordingly, next week they’ll announce their support for the open-source Sitemap Protocol, based on XML, says Computerworld.
“This protocol, which Google created and has been using for about 18 months, will be adopted by Yahoo effective Thursday, and the three companies will collaborate to extend and enhance it,” says the story.
Yahoo has been using another protocol, which it will continue to support. Microsoft will stop using its current protocol after it implements Sitemap Protocol in its search engine in early 2007, it adds.
Sitemaps, “are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling,” says Sitemaps.org.
“In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.
“Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.”
Sitemap 0.90 is offered under the terms of the Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License.
Now, if only Google, Microsoft and Yahoo can get together and jointly agree that ultimately, it’d also be in their mutual best financial interests not to support China’s Net censorship activities ……
Also See:
Computerworld – Google, Yahoo and Microsoft partner to help webmasters, November 16, 2006
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