Google (google.com) announced last week that it had released Google Sitemaps, a free program designed to help Web site owners get their pages crawled by the ubiquitous Google search engine.

"Google Sitemaps is an experiment in Web crawling," the company says on its site. "Using Sitemaps to inform and direct our crawlers, we hope to expand our coverage of the Web and improve the time to inclusion in our index."

Sitemaps works by using RSS capabilities via XML. In order to enable Google's crawlers to crawl a particular Web site, owners must place a Sitemaps formatted file on their Web servers. The XML code enables Google's crawlers to find out what pages are present and also those that have recently changed, making the necessary updates to its index.

Google says Sitemaps enables a "smarter crawl" of Web sites because it is quickly informed of site changes and modifications. The searches are fresher and deeper, helping users find more of a site's Web pages