Although all three companies may be bitter rivals in the race for search engine supremacy, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have decided to work together in one area - search engine submission. Microsoft and Yahoo said Thursday that they would adopt Google's Sitemaps protocol.

Google first announced the initiative in July 2005, and it was originally supported by just Yahoo and Google as a way to ease the site submission process.

Sitemaps is a protocol that allows the webmaster to manually enter URLs into Google and then check to see if the search engine has crawled them. Previously, a user would have to go to each site separately in order to submit and check on the status of crawls.

Now, a single Web site, sitemaps.org, would allow this process to be done once. An XML file placed on the website would give the search engine a "map" of the site including metadata that they would like included with the search results.

While Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google are the only major search engines currently supporting the protocol, the group is inviting others to do the same. Additionally, Sitemaps is already being used on the sites of the Wikimedia Foundation among others.

"Sitemaps address the challenges of a growing and dynamic Web by letting webmasters and search engines talk to each other, enabling a better web crawl and better results," Google Distinguished Entrepreneur Narayanan Shivakumar said.

According to all three companies, such a feature has been commonly requested by webmasters for some time. Grace Kwak of Google Zurich said that she hoped the announcement proved to skeptics that Sitemaps was more than "just a crazy Google experiment."

"The more Sitemaps eventually cover the entire web, the more we can revolutionize the way web crawlers interact with websites," she said. "In our view, the experiment is still underway."