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Gavin O'Reilly, the chairman of World Association of Newspapers (WAN), has welcomed search engine Exalead into the ACAP pilot - calling its involvement 'vital' to delivering on the project's proposals.

The Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP) pilot project was established to create a new, open standard of machine-readable rights and permissions for content published on websites.

However, the project has failed to convince any of the larger search engines to become full members.

In June O’Reilly - speaking as the head of one of the project's leading sponsors - admitted that he was 'perplexed' and 'somewhat troubled' that Google, MSN and Yahoo had chosen not to become full members of the ACAP project.

He then called on the big three search engines to embrace the online publishing project. Yet over six-months into a yearlong project they still have not joined, preferring to remain interested outside parties, despite O'Reilly's assurances that ACAP would not addresses the ongoing disagreements over copyright issues that exist between some of the larger search engines and publishers.

According to O'Reilly, the inclusion of Exalead, a search software provider for business and the web, will aid the technical implementation necessary before the project is unveiled in November.

"The involvement of Exalead is a vital and exciting development for ACAP, which is now well on track to fulfil its original objectives," said O'Reilly, in a press statement.

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Oliver Luft

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