Emerging open standard for search engine submissions

Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have agreed to use the Sitemaps 0.90 standard to let webmasters tell search engines how to direct their crawlers.  For details, see today' press release.

Comments.

• Sitemaps is a Google product and I believe that until now Google was its only user.  If so, then kudos to Google for voluntarily opening the standard and kudos to Yahoo and Microsoft for joining it rather than spurning it as "not built here". 
• For OA journals and repositories not already crawled by these three search engines, this is an easy way to increase your visibility.

Update. Google originally released the Sitemaps protocol last year under a Creative Commons license. So the kudos for Google remain, but should go back a year.