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Google Launches Google Sitemaps
Ninwa writes "Google has launched Google Sitemaps. It seems to be a service that allows webmasters to define how often their sites' content is going to change, to give Google a better idea of what to index. It uses some basic XML as the method of submitting a sitemap. More information on the protocol is available in an FAQ. What's most interesting is that Google is licensing the idea under the Attribution/Share Alike Creative Commons license. According to the Google Blog, this is being done '...so that other search engines can do a better job as well. Eventually we hope this will be supported natively in webservers (e.g. Apache, Lotus Notes, IIS).' They even offer an open source client in Python."
It will take a company with enough influence like Google to really promote XML sitemaps, which could lead to a great thing... but what is to stop them from becoming like MetaTags where companies will just flood them with useless keywords and entries in an attempt to get better search rankings?
Well, maybe if Google stop doing stuff for a while?
Lots of slashdotters seem interested in what Google does, either becuase it tends to be neat, or so they can worry about privacy and the info Google potentially has access to.
It benefits you because:
Also, you wouldn't necessarily have to maintain more than one sitemap. You could use XSLT to create the sitemap.html file for your site from the XML file you create for Google. In fact, wouldn't it be nice for Web authoring tools to do this automatically for you?
EricMake Easy Money with Google: The Blog (powered by blojsom)
Navigation is sometimes the hardest part on the internet. A tree structure is sometimes the second easiest way of searching/browsing for information (1st being keyword searching). So maybe if more web designers set up server side solutions, it will lower the burden on web designers. More importantly, move navigation away from web designers to users just as Google displaced content from web designers unto Searchers. So instead of overburdening web servers like this Firefox extension Firefox extension with screenshot which automatically generates a sitemap br crawling a site. Sites can access a sitemap using a favicon.ico like or link rel="sitemap.rdf or sitemap.xml" protocol. Just as netscape NAVIGATOR originally proposed a while back. I think web designers should pay attention - at least those that don't use flash for their whole site. The web is slowly become a database of content rather than style. See the webmonkey wired article on netscape sitemap feature Sitemap rdf or the sitemap slide here Slide from seminar
And thus Google will control the design, content and other things... HELP... they are taking over the internet
Nice. Google proposes a way to help web site administrators have a bit more control over how their site is perceived by a search engine, releases this proposal under an open source license, and at least a few people on slashdot accuse them of (*pinky to corner of mouth*) taking over the internet.
Most of Google's recent actions have been good things -- sponsoring open source developers for the summer, proposing ways for site administrators to provide additional info about their site, and implementing a "nofollow" option to prevent spammers trying to increase their page ranking. However, if they constantly get criticized and second-guessed for doing good things, what incentive do they have to continue? If you give a charity $20 and they criticize you for not giving them $30, are ever going to give anything to that charity again?
Let's give Google the benefit of the doubt. Just like a person, they'll probably make some mistakes, but like a person I'll give them the benefit of the doubt until they prove me wrong. Some corporations do actually do good things and still manage to be successful, and in those cases they should be supported, not attacked.
JAMWiki Java-based Wiki engine
My rss feeds already publishes my newest/freshest pages. Why did they didn't just extended it with some aditional attributes/tags instead of forcing me to implement another xml format?
This is a cool idea, because I've often wondered about being able to "talk" to search engines at a slightly higher level than robots.txt allows.
One of my students wrote his thesis on this a few years ago. He proposed a neat XML based protocol to inform crawlers about (a) directory structure of the web site (b) frequency of change (c) files that had been changed since last visit plus all other things already supported by robots.txt (excludes, time of visit, etc.)
Alex Lopez-Ortiz