BetaNews is reporting that Google is offering an open source tool
to allow webmasters to create a sitemap that will make it easier for Google's webcrawlers to index that particular site.
As someone whose developed search engines and webcrawlers I can see the value in having such a tool for my webcrawler available. And because Google is so big and powerful there is no doubt a segment of the web will adopt this tool. But there is a downside to the adoption of this technology. How much will Google now be able to influence how a web site designs it's site to fit the parameters of a tool that could change over time? And what about all the other search engines?
This is definitely something to do more research on andd keep an eye on. More to come...