April 11, 2007 12:53 PM PDT
Ask joins Google, Yahoo, Microsoft in indexing tool
Used to be that when you wanted your Web site to be indexed in the major search engines you had to submit the Web address and other location information to each of them separately. Now the top four sites are letting you do it in one fell swoop. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft announced in November that they would adopt the same site submission protocol and provide one centralized place for Web site owners to manually feed their pages to the search companies and to check whether their sites have been crawled. Now, Ask has joined the group too. This new "auto-discovery" feature will cut the time and effort it takes Web masters to get their sites included in the search indexes.
Elinor Mills covers Internet security and privacy. She joined CNET News in 2005 after working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Portugal and writing for The Industry Standard, the IDG News Service, and the Associated Press. E-mail Elinor. 
