[uf-discuss] Enumerating Microformats on a Page

[Scott Reynen]

On Mar 26, 2006, at 7:48 PM, Antonio Touriño wrote:

>> I'd want to take advantage of it to decide where to start, but not
>> where to end.  A search engine should seek to maximize the search
>> area to improve results.  I want to look at everything on your site,
>> unless instructed otherwise.
>
> If there are cases in which you might not want to believe the sitemap.
> what are they? How are you going to distinguish them? If you are going
> to selectively chose when to rely on a sitemap then I don't see the
> point to it.

I would always believe a site map as *a* source of links, but I would  
never believe a site map as *the* source of links. If there were  
microformat site maps, I would have my crawler look for them, and  
start spidering a site from the addresses listed in a site map,  
because that would likely lead to microformat content more quickly  
than just traversing every link (which is what it does now).  When it  
was done with those addresses in the site map, I would have it go on  
to traverse all links.  So if the site map was inaccurate, I still  
wouldn't be missing anything (so I'd say no harm done), and if it was  
accurate, the spidering would be slightly more efficient.  I doubt  
that efficiency is worth the time and effort of developing site maps,  
but as it's not my time and effort, I have no reason to discourage  
anyone who thinks otherwise.

Peace,
Scott