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:wow

[harrythefish]

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