Old news, but good news for Sourcers

Posted by Jim Stroud

October 4, 2007

Whoops! This is one of those things that I meant to post awhile ago, but somehow never did. Back in November ‘06, the big 3 agreed to standardize the website indexing process. Good news for Sourcers! Why? I think (or is that hope) this will lead to faster and more relevant searches overall. (At least, in theory.)

Read it for yourself…

Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo will all begin using Google Sitemaps in an attempt to standardize and improve the website indexing process. Sitemaps are XML files describing the layout of the site with associated metadata. Those files can let web spiders know the last time a page changed and how important a changed page is so that the indexing process is streamlined. With sitemaps, only pages with changes are visited, which saves bandwidth.

Sitemaps was originally created by Google in June 2005 and released under the Attribution/Share Alike Creative Commons license. Yahoo began using it within a couple of months its release. Combined, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have an 85.3 percent search engine market share as of July 2006 according to comScore.

In a joint statement, Windows Live Search general manager Ken Moss said, “the quality of your index is predicated by the quality of your sources and Windows Live Search is happy to be working with Google and Yahoo! on Sitemaps to not only help webmasters, but also help consumers by delivering more relevant search results so they can find what they’re looking for faster.”

READ: Big three search engines to use common indexing tool