ACAP and Search Engines
ACAP rules can be considered as an extension to the Robots Exclusion Standard (or "robots.txt") for communicating website access information to automated web crawlers.
It has been suggested that ACAP is unnecessary, since the robots.txt protocol already exists for the purpose of managing search engine access to websites. However, others support ACAP’s view that robots.txt is no longer sufficient. ACAP argues that robots.txt was devised at a time when both search engines and online publishing were in their infancy and as a result is insufficiently nuanced to support today’s much more sophisticated business models of search and online publishing. ACAP aims to make it possible to express more complex permissions than the simple binary choice of “inclusion” or “exclusion”.
As an early priority, ACAP is intended to provide a practical and consensual solution to some of the rights-related issues which in some cases have led to litigation between publishers and search engines.
No public search engines recognise Acap. Only one, Exalead, ever confirmed that they will be adopting the standard, but they have since ceased functioning as a search portal to focus on the software side of their business.
Read more about this topic: Automated Content Access Protocol
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