Google, Yahoo and Microsoft partner to help webmasters

Strange bedfellows Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. have partnered to simplify how webmasters and online publishers submit their sites’ content for indexing in the companies’ search engines.

In a rare collaborative effort, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, which compete directly in Internet search and other online services, plan to announce on Thursday their support for the open-source Sitemap Protocol, based on XML.

This protocol, which Google created and has been using for about 18 months, will be adopted by Yahoo effective Thursday, and the three companies will collaborate to extend and enhance it. Yahoo has been using another protocol, which it will continue to support. Microsoft will stop using its current protocol after it implements Sitemap Protocol in its search engine in early 2007.

A site map is a file that webmasters and publishers put on their sites to guide the search engines’ automated Web crawlers in properly indexing their Web pages.

Site maps are particularly useful in highlighting to crawlers the dynamic Web content that is served up on the fly. Crawlers generally index content contained in static Web pages without problems, but often they have difficulty with dynamic content, such as the one that is generated as a result of a search query.

A site map can be formatted using various protocols, but this means more work for webmasters and publishers, which is why Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are throwing their weight behind the Sitemap Protocol to promote it as a standard.

“The benefit for publishers is that they’ll get more of their content indexed more rapidly,” said Tim Mayer, Yahoo’s senior director of global search.

Meanwhile, the three companies believe the common protocol will improve site maps in general and along the way make their search engine crawlers more comprehensive in their indexing, a benefit that will trickle down to end users.

“Ultimately, what we care about is the best results for searchers and making things easy for site owners. This really does that,” said Vanessa Fox, product manager for Google’s Webmaster Central.

In addition to listing Web pages available for indexing, the Sitemap Protocol also lets publishers and webmasters include other relevant information, like when a page was last updated, how frequently it changes and what its importance level is on the site. All of this leads to more precise and effective crawling, the officials said.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo will encourage other search engine operators, as well as makers of related software, like content management systems vendors, to support the protocol, they said.

Offered under the terms of the Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License, the protocol will be publicly available here starting Thursday.

Microsoft says Gmail is a virus

It seems that Microsoft has started flagging Gmail as a virus in their virus scanning software Windows Live OneCare. Many people are reporting that every time they open Gmail, a warning is displayed telling the user they are infected with “BAT/BWG.A”.

Now, either Gmail is a virus, or Microsoft is generating false positives. Some affected by this “virus” say other anti-virus products do not pick up the infection — to me, this is a bit suspicious.

So who should be responsible for fixing the problem? Either Google can wait for Microsoft to update their virus definitions (I don’t know how often that happens, or if this will be fixed when it does), or they can identify what is being flagged and change it right away to avoid annoyed users. Another question I have is weather any sort of legal action can be taken if this continues for an extended period of time, and it turns out to be false?

One thing is certain, those who use Windows Live OneCare and Gmail are all worried they have a virus they can’t get rid of. Some might even get frustrated enough to either quit using Gmail or Windows Live OneCare depending on which one they think is to blame.