Jim Downing

From techcrunch: Yahoo, Google and MSN have agreed to standardize on a sitemaps protocol. The new standard apparently it looks a lot like Google sitemaps, but is numbered 0.90, so perhaps there are a few features still to go in.

Why is this important for me in the data/repositories world? Well, It’s becoming increasingly clear that getting search engines to harvest metadata, or getting them to crawl metadata-only splash pages doesn’t work and we should be directing them straight to the full text if we want our content to be indexed effectively. Sitemaps allow us to build search optimized representations of our content (this applies double for data without a default textual representation) and point the engines straight to them.