Major Search Engines Collaborate on Web Index Tool - Reaction from the Community
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Yahoo notes in its blog that "this is the first-ever joint announcement by all three search rivals" and couldn't resist titling the entry "Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft Join Forces (really!!)." The rest of the search community seems to be as delighted about this new development as the three search engines themselves.
"At industry conferences, webmasters have asked for open standards just like this," remarked Danny Sullivan. "This is a great development for the whole community and addresses a real need of webmasters in a very convenient fashion. I believe it will lead to greater collaboration in the industry for common standards, including those based around robots.txt, a file that gives web crawlers direction when they visit a website."
David Berkowitz, director of strategic planning for search engine marketing firm 360i, takes a more understated approach. "There's a sense that search optimization could get a little easier," he noted. "This partnership could help pave the way for clearing some of those headaches that marketers and site owners face."
As of this writing, SEO forums have just started to pick up on the news. SEO_AM, a regular contributor to SEO Chat's forums, noted in a post linking to news of the announcement that "At least we will have some site map standardization. It is also nice to know that the Big 3 do talk to each other and, occasionally, agree on a common goal."
Others have been more enthusiastic. The WebProNews video elicited no fewer than 44 comments, with many cheering the news and agreeing that it's about time something like this happened. Some posters were particularly pleased that Sitemaps.org would not carry a brand. One poster sounded a negative note: "I can only imagine that there will be a lot of problems at first that will need to be ironed out." The general take-home message was that this will save a lot of work all around - and given that it will probably improve the search experience for everyone, it's a big win indeed. If this works out well, we may see more of these kinds of initiatives in the future.
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