There’s a growing base of individuals, mostly bloggers, pondering the thought that the search giant Google, Inc. may be making a calculated move by looking for files that in some cases simply don’t exist. The files that the Google’s spider, known as “Googlebot” has reportedly requested from thousands blogs around the net all share the same filenames -- atom.xml, and index.rdf.

Atom.xml is the default file for an XML content syndication system, known as Atom. (Visit http://www.atomenabled.org/ for more information). Google’s Blogger.com service also utilizes this syndication format.

Index.rdf is another default filename used by the Resource Description Framework format for syndicating with XML. Again, this is quite common with blogs.

What makes this story quite unique, is that in many cases, these two files are not linked to or mentioned in any way, and as previously stated, don’t exist. This leads people to believe that Google’ is actually guessing that these files are there. Why would Google want to do that?

I’ve been reading hundreds of posts on blogs around the net. I’ve found some interesting speculations.

Blogger Photo Matt writes “I suspect this is a hint of something new coming, perhaps feed-aware search like Feedster or RSS links in search results like Yahoo. Maybe a Google-aggregator? Google BlogNews? I want answers! They’ve got some room on above the search box since their redesign, maybe the next item there will be a “blog” tab.”

Blogger Evhead writes “Could it be that Google is building some sort of feed search, but purposely dissing one (or more) of the most common formats, in order to get people to switch to one of two other formats?”