No, no, you don’t need to worry about the three search engines merging and not being able to use your favorite anymore. But tomorrow, Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft will announce support for Sitemaps, a free open-source software tool that allows web-site owners (from bloggers to online merchants) to make their site’s content more easily discoverable by search engines — and therefore improve your search results.

Search engines crawl the Web to find sites to add to their indexes. This essentially involves fetching a web page, extracting its content and following the links on the page to discover other pages. The search engines assess the quality of a page as well as how often it changes to determine the interval it will visit the page and update the content. Blow this up to billions of web pages and you have a search engine index that’s continually updated.

As you might expect, the crawlers have to work very hard to get so much of the content on the web. Having a content feed between search engines and publishers is a much more efficient way to discover newly created and updated content. Sitemaps allow web-site owners to create a catalog of their pages for the search engines so that search results are more comprehensive. Sitemaps also inform crawlers of content updates and new pages, so search results are fresher as well. By announcing joint support for Sitemaps, Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft are putting their weight behind this new standard and encouraging all site owners to adopt it.

So, what does it mean for you? Over time, this should help improve your Yahoo! Search experience. We work hard to be comprehensive and fresh so that we can answer your queries relevantly, and this is yet another tool in our toolbox.

If you’re a site owner, please come to Site Explorer from Yahoo! Search to learn how your site is represented in our index and how to submit your Sitemaps or any other site feeds (including RSS). More technical details for site owners are available at www.sitemaps.org and on the Yahoo! Search blog.

It’s rare that you get the chance to have a headline like this, so I couldn’t resist. In fact, I believe this is the first-ever joint announcement by all three search rivals. This was possible because we all want to improve the search experience and are hopeful this bit of “coopetition” will improve your query results and (we like to believe) your lives.

Priyank Garg
Product Manager, Yahoo! Search