Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! get chummy with searching

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On them for not letting any competitive malarkey get in the way of providing a means of website managers showing search engines how their website is structured. That's the biggies and I'm sure the rest will follow suit pretty soon.

[geek warning, 99.99% of us don't need to know the following]
I'll let Google give you the low down:
Last year we published the Sitemap 0.84 XML protocol as a free and easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about URLs on their web sites so that search engines can more effectively crawl them. We released it under the Attribution/Share Alike Creative Commons license in the hopes that other search engines would adopt the protocol too. And today, we're excited to announce that Yahoo! and Microsoft are joining us in officially supporting the Sitemap protocol.

As the web becomes more dynamic, Sitemaps will enable better and fresher search results for everyone who uses the web. For site owners, Sitemaps will help improve website visibility in search results. You can read more about this on our Webmaster Central blog.

[geek warning over, stand down]

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