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Search engine giant Google has been offering a feature called Sitemap for webmasters since quite some time. The same technology has not received the support from other two search engine giants MSN and Yahoo!

The three rivals in the internet search business are now collaborating to make it easier for the webmasters to get their websites properly indexed in these search engines.

They have announced their support for the open source, Sitemap Protocol based on XML.

This protocol is already supported by Google and is now being adopted by Yahoo! and these three companies have announced their plans to collaborate to extend and enhance it. Yahoo! has also been using their own technology providing similar features and they would continue to support it in the near future.

Tim Mayer, Yahoo’s senior director of global search spoke on this new development: “The benefit for publishers is that they’ll get more of their content indexed more rapidly.” Vanessa Fox, product manager for Google’s Webmaster Central added: “Ultimately what we care about is the best results for searchers and making things easy for site owners. This really does that.”