Google, Yahoo, Microsoft team up on web indexes

Search engine rivals Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are teaming up to make it easier for website owners to make sure their sites get included in the web indexes, the companies are expected to announce on Thursday.

The companies are adopting Google’s Sitemaps protocol, available since June 2005, which allows website owners to feed their pages manually to Google and to check whether their sites have been crawled. Website owners have had to follow similar processes at each of the other major search engines separately.

Now, website owners will be able to go to one place for alerting the search engines to their web pages, something they have been requesting for some time, said Tim Mayer, director of product management at Yahoo Search.

“In the first joint and open initiative to improve the web crawl process for search engines, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft today announced support for Sitemaps 0.90, a free and easy way for webmasters to notify search engines about their websites and be indexed more comprehensively and efficiently, resulting in better representation in search indices,” a joint news release said. “For users, Sitemaps enables higher quality, fresher search results.”

Read more: ZDNet.co.uk