The new Google program Sitemaps is now available free to web administrators and owners, no matter what the size of their websites. "This collaborative crawling system will allow our crawlers to optimize the usefulness of Google's index for users by improving its coverage and freshness," the company said.

Sitemaps calls for Web administrators to place a Sitemaps-formatted file on their Web servers. This allows the Google crawlers to see which pages are present on a site and which have been changed. Web administrator create an XML file to use Sitemaps, and need to know how to run scripts. The Sitemap Generator requires Python 2.2 or higher.

Google describes Sitemaps as "an experiment in web crawling." The company says that this program is intended to let Google expand its web coverage and "improve the time to inclusion in our index." The company said that the program fits in with its "mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible."