Google (and other search) "Integration"

[jtickle]

I don't mean a search box we can use to search the site or the web - that already exists.

We need to take a serious look at the big search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing for starters) and find out what tools we can give to our users to better work with them.

For instance, we could intelligently make a robots.txt. I would prefer not to have an actual robots.txt file on the server since I don't normally let Apache write to the directory that it would need to in such a case; but we CAN serve robots.txt up dynamically, it does not have to actually be on the server.

For Google in particular, we need an easy way to add a meta tag - this is so you can gain control of your domain from Webmaster Tools. I would prefer this interface to not be "add an arbitrary meta tag"; rather, make it "Paste the thing from Google Site Verification here" organized under something named "Search Engine Integration".

┆Issue is synchronized with this Asana task

[jtickle]

There are additional ways to integrate specifically with the Google Search Appliance and we can create tickets for those whenever we are informed of what is available.

[trf000]

Bing now offers webmaster tools like Google does to address this kind of need. Since they are partnered with Yahoo on search, the tools cover them as well.