New York - A consortium of newspaper publishers on Thursday introduced ACAP, a new open standard that will allow publishers, broadcasters and others to express the individual access and usage policies of their websites to search engine robots.

The standard was released after a year-long pilot project undertaken by the World Association of Newspapers, International Publishers Association and European Publishers Council.

It was developed as publishers sought a means of exerting greater control over how search engines index their sites than is available with the existing, 13-year-old standard.

The new ACAP standard lets publishers limit how long search engines can retain copies of Web pages in their caches, and stipulate that search engines do not follow links, among other features.

Representatives from major search engine providers Google, Yahoo and Microsoft were on hand at the announcement of ACAP's introduction, the Associated Press reports, although their adoption of the new standard is voluntary.

"We are not members of ACAP but we are involved informally as are our competitors," said Yahoo SVP of intellectual property Joe Siino.

"We appreciate the concerns of our publisher partners that they should feel confident to make content available to the world."

Google is reportedly also still evaluating ACAP.

"Before you go and take something entirely on board, you need to make sure it works for everyone," Google spokeswoman Jessica Powell told AP.

Among publishers, The Times Online is the first website to take up the ACAP standard.

Related Links:
http://snipurl.com/1ue54 (AP)

http://www.the-acap.org/implement-acap.php

http://www.wan-press.org