Kudos to Danny Sullivan for arranging to have the major search engines come together in a summit at the upcoming New York SES show. This indexing summit will allow the search engines (Yahoo, MSN Search, Google and Ask Jeeves) to "hear and discuss ideas on what web site owners would like in terms how their content gets indexed". If the summit is successful, it could result in solving some major problems that exist (think 302 redirect hijacking here). You can read more about it at http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050210-134417 and http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=4139
Obviously, each search engine has its own way of doing things, but there are some issues that would clearly benefit from having some sort of standards applied. Yahoo! solved the 302 redirect problem in a sensible way, and if that were to become the standard across search engines, one major problem would be wiped out quickly. The search engines did a great job of coming together on the blog comment problem, and this kind of cooperation could be used for several other problems as well. So hats off again to Danny for accomplishing this initial step. I hope it proves fruitful.
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