Transparent Content Negotiation & Search Engine Indexation.

Hi all,

This message has been posted to the w3's list and to the technical support 
for different major search engines. Please reply to the list (I will commit 
the messages send only to me).

Simply put, let say that http://www.name.com is a pointer to 8 different 
document (4 locales: en-us, en-ca, fr-ca, es-us. 2 document type: html, wml).

There is no translation, the content for the locales is COMPLETELY unrelated.

There is a link to switch to the 3 other locales on all the pages (both wml 
and html).

The transparent content negotiation is based on the accept* and the 
user-agent HTTP headers.

If there is no match in the available permutations (locales x dtd), or if 
there is nothing specified, the default locale is en-us and the default DTD 
is html.

Here are my questions:

Q1: Does the indexing robots make use of the content negotiation parameters 
(http headers)? If so, in what way?

Q2: Does the search engines return result URIs from documents that were 
obtained with a robot using content negotiation parameters (http headers) 
that match those of the user?
ie: Would a spanish user get http://www.name.com  (not 
http://www.name.com/index.es.html, the link to the spanish section from 
other locales) for keywords on the spanish version?

thanks,

vincent

Received on Friday, 5 January 2001 16:14:12 UTC