Via Bokardo:
Google is releasing to the world (via Creative Commons license) a new XML format for site maps.
This new format is an XML representation of your web site that Search
Spiders would read upon entering your site, much like they read the
robots.txt file now. Several things are very interesting about this:
- This is the #1 Search Engine company doing this.
- This is Web 2.0 in all its semantic markup glory.
- This
could be the beginning of a web site discovery format with which we
could build simple tools that search for relevant content (without
having to go through a search engine!). Obviously, though, Google sees
an opportunity to leverage this format to improve their own Search.
Very interesting indeed, especially point 3. This would have some impact on search engine marketing, which assumes that any search for web content starts from the search engine. I mean a reasonable assumption but what with the increasing portions of the marketing and advertising budgets pouring into the search engine marketing and optimisation, I would closely watch what the search engines are up to and developments in applications such as Y!Mindset and Google Sitemaps.
