Google clearly understands the importance of grokking change. Thursday it launched and “experiment” it calls Google Sitemaps, an XML-based open standard that allows webmasters to inform Google of website changes. Slashdot thread here. Danny on this here.
From its blog post:
We’re undertaking an experiment called Google Sitemaps that will either fail miserably, or succeed beyond our wildest dreams, in making the web better for webmasters and users alike. It’s a beta “ecosystem” that may help webmasters with two current challenges: keeping Google informed about all of your new web pages or updates, and increasing the coverage of your web pages in the Google index.
Interesting to note:
This project doesn’t just pertain to Google, either: we’re releasing it under the Attribution/Share Alike Creative Commons license so that other search engines can do a better job as well. Eventually we hope this will be supported natively in webservers (e.g. Apache, Lotus Notes, IIS).