Google almost hits the big 5-0

The October U.S. Search Share rankings are out and to no one's surprise, Google is still King with almost half of all U.S. searchers using Google as their search engine of choice. That's up 23% over the prior year. Yahoo still comes in second with almost 24% of all searches performed in the U.S. Surprisingly, Yahoo had stronger growth at 30% over the last year. MSN holds only about 9% share and actually lost users at a rate of 8%. This ClickZ article has a nice chart which includes the top 10 for October.

Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft Adopt Standard Sitemap Protocol

The top three major search engines have agreed on a sitemap protocal to make it easier for their spiders to index content. This article does a good job of laying out the basics. But, if you'd really like to dive into the deep end on the topic of sitemaps and the new protocol... go to Sitemaps.org. It's the official site detailing the new format.