Racing toward a better search engine

Why you might want to use XML for spiders

[grnidone]

This article makes me wonder if using XML today will be like tweaking the meta tags back in 1996. Does anyone have any experience with how spiders crawl XML tags? Is it an advantage? -G

 ... some companies are even going further and using Extensible Markup Language (XML) to improve search technology. XML is able to index and place tags, or short descriptors, next to textual information so that machines can better determine the nature of that text.

...

Many experts consider XML important for improving the world of search engines. XML, like HTML, makes use of tags, but while HTML specifies what each tag means, XML uses tags to add context to the data.

[msnbc.com...]

[rencke]

The article seems to argue that search engines would be better of if they and everybody else use XML. But the only SE that has said they are looking into XML so far is Google. Altavista, says they will not index XML, at least that's the last I've heard. So, for a site owner to migrate to XML seems to be a perilous journey, leaving major search engines way behind. There is also another aspect:

XYZFind returns actual content aggregated from all matching documents, not just links to documents This could give rise to some really complicated copyright issues, if provided as an online service.