Last week when I conducted a search only to find out that Google was so bad it was not able to make a distinction between a site that gets updated daily, and a site that was not updated for 12 months, hinting that Google perhaps was not in the search business anymore, I thought this could not go down further. I thought they had reached the bottom. In fact no, they managed to find an agreement with Microsoft and Yahoo! (are those guys in the search business?) in order to allow, drum rolls, to improve how search engines index websites by providing a set of hints, an xml file called a sitemap.

When you take a look at the xml file, not even wondering why xml makes things automatically better (it goes without saying...), you find out that it lets one give a ton of hints on how often the site gets updated. I think spammers, deceptive marketers (or marketers, for short) and those willing to make money with ad impressions are going to like that a lot. Of course, just to get the record straight, among those making money with ad impressions and fishy marketing are Google (AdSense+AdWords), Microsoft (AdCenter) and Yahoo! (YPN).

None of the sitemap protocol makes it easier and better (that's what the marketing brochure says, not me) to publicly disclose query parameters used in one's urls to drive what dynamic-based web pages are supposed to do.

File this under "Google cluelessness reaches a top".

And yes, another proof that those guys are not in the search business anymore. I mean, when you start asking site owners to make life easier for you, what's next? May be Google will soon be asking that you run a crawler on your machine, so that their servers don't get too hot. I thought search engines were supposed to do the heavy lifting because they could then take advantage of large repositories to improve quality and consistency of results (especially rule out spamming)...What a naïve person I am.