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."

Comments

great interview

[professorhojo]

for more crunchy detail, here's a great Q&A interview i found with Shiva Shivakumar, engineering director and the technical lead for Google Sitemaps:

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050602-1952 24

More unabashed Google loving...

[sachmet]

Everyone else defines a protocol. But apparently Google defines protocools.

I guess the rest of the world has a long way to go to catch up...

Cool idea

[aftk2]

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.

For example, a website we launched a couple months ago is primarily images. We played nice - all of the images have legitimate alt tags, and we tried to let the site degrade properly in older browsers (although you really wouldn't get much, in those instances).

But the biggest problem we had was trying to get the site spidered by Google. It would be, and it would appear in the index, but it would be listed far below sites that linked to it. I don't believe Google likes sites that are primarily images. We populated meta tags with descriptions, but they weren't included; we even tried using hidden text - legitimate, hidden text that would serve as the sites description, but not break the design - but you know how Google feels about those sorts of things. We had to walk a fine line. This'll be nicer.

Re:Cool idea

[rehannan]

I just put a new site online. About 4 or 5 days after submitting it to google, it was the number one hit when searching for the title of the site.

Re:Cool idea

[singleantler]

It's quite common to be high up for matching terms for about a week, then disappear for three months or so. This seems to be normal behaviour for new sites and is nicknamed the Google sandbox and seems to have been confirmed by the patent application recently made public.

The sandbox is just an artificial lowering, so if you're a match for a rare term you can still be found quite easily.

Google is IT's Willy Wonka

[stlhawkeye]

I envision the interior of Google as this huge warehouse full of oversized transistors, data streams with paddleboats, waterfalls of caffeinated beer, chairs contoured like a keyboard key, where diminutive men in green hair sing songs about electrons and logic gates and if you wander into the room where Duke Nukem 3D is being tested you'll be thrown out.

Google Evil Index

[yotto]

In other news, the Google Evil Index went down 3.2 points today, and is currently at 13.8, the lowest it's been since right before the beta rollout of Google Web Accelerator.

Re:How does this benefit me?

[Eric Giguere]

It benefits you because:

• Google will hopefully crawl your frequently-changing pages more often
• Conversly, Google won't crawl other pages as often, saving your bandwith
• Google will find pages that it wouldn't normally find just by following links

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?

Eric
Make Easy Money with Google: The Blog (powered by blojsom)

Or maybe another hidden use...

[823723423]

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

Re:Next thing you know...

[phidipides]

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.