Google and Yahoo! Working Together On Better Web Indexing

Karzz1 writes "In an exclusive video interview with WebProNews, Yahoo and Google announced a collaborative site called sitemaps.org. Yahoo!'s Tim Mayer states in the video, 'This is something we are announcing tonight at around 9 PM tonight (Las Vegas) Google and Yahoo have gotten together to provide webmasters and publishers a unified way to send their content... let our search engines know about new and existing content.'"

Comments

What About Microsoft?

[eldavojohn]

Well, I went to the sitemaps.org site & looked around for the people owning/running/maintaining the page. In the TOS, I found it to start with:

Terms of service

This is a contract between you and each of the sponsors of Sitemaps.org: Google, Inc., Yahoo, Inc., and Microsoft Corporation (referred to collectively in this agreement as the "Sponsors," "we," or "us"). By using the Sitemaps.org website (the "Website") you agree to be bound by the following terms and conditions (the "Terms of Service").

Scope of Terms of Services; License

These Terms of Service govern your use of the Website. The Sponsors' copyrights in the sitemaps protocol specification, as published on the Website (the "Specification"), are licensed to you under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License (version 2.5). Other than the Sponsors' copyrights in this Specification, no intellectual property rights of any kind are granted or may arise under these Terms of Service, whether express, implied or otherwise.

So as you can see, Microsoft is also involved in a project under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License (version 2.5). Which is in and of itself something newsworthy in my opinion--since they're so often played as the bad guy on Slashdot. Frankly, the article states:

"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," said Ken Moss, General Manager of Windows Live Search at Microsoft.

So why is Microsoft omitted from the summary & title of this news? Surely their Windows Live Search is contributing just as much as Yahoo!'s search or Google's search engine.

I'm confused--when Microsoft does something good, do we just ignore it? You know, I'm all for criticizing their evil plans for world domination in the software market but shouldn't news be subjective not objective even if it is only for nerds?

Side note, I'll bet this post hits rock bottom like any other post that says something positive about Microsoft.

Re:What About Microsoft?

[Kozz]

I'm confused--when Microsoft does something good, do we just ignore it?

You must be new here.

Re:What About Microsoft?

[Salvance]

What I find interesting is that this article was submitted multiple times last night with Microsoft's name actually included Microsoft in the title (the Firehose is a pretty cool feature of being a subscriber BTW since you can see all submissions, not just accepted ones). Either the wording wasn't as concise/clear (I don't remember), or there was a little bias exhibitted by the editors.

Re:What About Microsoft?

[Karzz1]

I was the one who submitted this article and the reason MS was not mentioned is that they were not involved in the video interview that was released. I could have been a bit more specific with regards to the description though, so as not to ignore MS involvement in the project.

Re:What About Microsoft?

[Himring]

Its not the fact that we ignore the good things that Microsoft do...its the fact that that Microsoft rarely do a sumthing good that we get distracted by the bad things its doin....

...

ahh, my hed asplode....

Re:What About Microsoft?

[joto]

In other words, MSN is bigger in the search market, than firefox is in the browser market.

Re:What About Microsoft?

[ScentCone]

or there was a little bias exhibitted by the editors

Is that like being a little pregnant?

Re:What About Microsoft?

[pboulang]

That is completely new behavior on the part of the editors. In the past they have always had the utmost journalistic integrity and wrote the book on balanced reporting. Maybe they are being held captive kidnappers and this is their cry for help. You should call the FBI to come in and investigate.

Re:wow

[harrythefish]

YaGoo(r)! Surely? Sounds like a Web 2.0 Bukkake party

Re:Subjective...

[LanMan04]

That's exactly right. The priority tag only applies to pages on your site, and is a relative measure. So (I would assume) that assigning a priority range of 0 to 0.5 would be the same to the search engine as a range of 0.5 to 1.

In other words, assigning a priority of 1 to all your pages will not affect their ranking vs. *other* sites that appear in the search results, only vs. other pages on your site. And if they're all 1, then you're telling the crawler that they're all equally important, just as if you had assigned them all a value of .5 (or anything else).