In the first joint and open initiative to improve the web crawl process for search engines, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft today announced support for Sitemaps 0.90, a free and easy way for marketers and website owners to notify search engines about their websites.

Sitemaps 0.90 is set to be a one-stop shop for webmasters in which they can now alert all three major search engines of their websites, and all at the same time. The companies are adopting Google's Sitemaps protocol which enables webmasters to manually feed their pages directly to Google, MSN, and Yahoo!, and to check whether their sites have been crawled. Before Sitemaps 0.90, webmasters would have to repeat a similar process for each of the major search engines.

Here an official quote from the Google Search Blog:

I personally love the idea behind Sitemaps 0.90. It's not only simple, but also beneficial. As a search engine marketer, it saves me time from having to setup and manage each account individually and provides sites with a more comprehensive and efficient indexing process... allowing for an overall better representation in search.

And let's not forget the users... who benefit from having a more complete, higher-quality, and fresher search index.

For more information Sitemaps 0.90, visit the MSN, Yahoo!, and Google search blogs.