[aciurczak]

You can definitely confirm it is functioning just by looking at the files it creates. Whether it is "working" by getting your site better indexed by the search engines, that's open for some debate, but by and large it helps a great deal.

I am noticing that its effectiveness seems to have waned in the past few months. When I first installed this, Google would send dozens of searchbots to my site each day to crawl the latest additions to the sitemap. I'd have a top 5 hit on google for any specific text in a thread title within a day or two of the original posting on my site.

But lately, even though Google downloads the new sitemap at least once per day (can check that in the logs and also by logging in to your webmaster account at Google), by also looking at the Track Guests mod I can see that it only sends 1 or 2 searchbots to my site per day (other than the adsense bots), and the new pages aren't getting indexed nearly as quickly. In fact, Yahoo is now sending dozens (sometimes hundreds) of bots to my site based on their grabbing that same sitemap, and it also appears that more of my visitors are now coming to me via Yahoo search than Google. I still think this is a great tool, but I wish Google used the files with the same vigor that they used to.