Automated Content Access Protocol: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 23:14, 8 May 2011

Revision as of 08:21, 2 July 2011

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==ACAP and search engines==

One of ACAP's initial goals is to provide better rules to search engine crawlers (or robots) when accessing websites. In this role it can be considered as an extension to the [[Robots Exclusion Standard]] (or ''"robots.txt"'') for communicating [[website]] access information to automated [[web crawler]]s.

It has been suggested<ref>[http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/09/news-publishers-want-full-control-of.html News Publishers Want Full Control of the Search Results]</ref> that ACAP is unnecessary, since the ''robots.txt'' protocol already exists for the purpose of managing search engine access to websites. However, others<ref>[http://www.yelvington.com/20061016/why_you_should_care_about_automated_content_access_protocol Why you should care about Automated Content Access Protocol]</ref> support ACAP’s view<ref>[http://www.the-acap.org/faqs.php#existing_protocols ACAP FAQ on robots.txt]</ref> that ''robots.txt'' is no longer sufficient. ACAP argues that ''robots.txt'' was devised at a time when both search engines and online publishing were in their infancy and as a result is insufficiently nuanced to support today’s much more sophisticated business models of search and online publishing. ACAP aims to make it possible to express more complex permissions than the simple binary choice of “inclusion” or “exclusion”.