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The Big Three Search Engines Collaborate with Sitemaps Project
What began as two-way collaboration between Google and Yahoo has become a trio with the recent inclusion of Microsoft. These three major search engine providers have agreed on a common framework for webmasters to interface with the searching products they provide, in the form of sitemaps.org. Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages available for “crawling” (pages are downloaded by an automated service and processed to allow fast centralized searching.).
The system involves a file submission by a webmaster to sitemaps.org, which is then accessed by each of the search providers, which use the information to update their records. The file uploaded is an XML file that allows designers to create customized tags, enabling the definition, transmission, validation, and interpretation of data between applications and between organizations.
There are two major benefits from this collaboration. First, web search engines will need to do less “crawling” to ensure that their records about websites are up to date, meaning less overall Internet bandwidth is used. Second, webmasters will have more control over what data search engines present about their websites, and this data will be more consistent among the different search engines.
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