Traditionally, very large sites have provided a directory of the information they've made available using a navigational device known as a sitemap. The intent was originally to help users find information they were looking for with the least amount of effort. Turns out, however, there were better solutions to this problem, namely search engines.
Why dig through a long list of irrelevant information when you can simply type in some keywords and get a much more accurate list of potential matches? Sitemaps made a lot of sense before search engine technology was available on a wide scale, but as we discussed in Chapter 6, Searching the Product Catalog, adding search to our applications is now super easy. Even sites that don't offer a search engine can be searched using Google.
So why does Django include a module for automatic sitemap generation? These sitemaps are a little different from the traditional sitemaps, which were usually designed in HTML for human consumption. The sitemaps...