Rising to the top: evaluating the use of the HTML meta tag to improve retrieval of World Wide Web documents through Internet search engines

摘要

The problem of finding materials on the World Wide Web has been discussed in library and information science journals, computer literature, and the popular media. Internet search engines have been developed to aid in finding materials; however, their performances vary considerably. Numerous researchers have evaluated these tools and have detailed their strengths and weaknesses. Melee's Indexing Coverage Analysis (MICA) report, issued weekly, details the number of pages indexed by various Internet search engines; in addition, the speed of the systems is evaluated (Melee 1998). Other authors have analyzed particular aspects of Internet search engines, such as their retrieval precision (Leighton and Srivastava 1997), their usability (Pollock and Hockley 1997), and their indexing methods (Srinivasan, Ruiz, and Lam 1996). Some researchers have offered advice to the authors of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) documents about improving retrieval of their materials. The current research was designed to determine how useful one method, the HTML META tag, is in improving accessibility via Internet search engines; here we focus on indexing rather than on search engine performance. METADATA AND THE HTML META TAG Much has been written about the importance of metadata for understanding and using electronic resources. This literature sheds light on the types of issues that the HTML META tag (see figure 1) is intended to address. Metadata is commonly defined as data about data. A more complete definition notes that metadata provides "a user (human or machine) with a means to discover that the resource exists and how it might be obtained or accessed. It can cover many aspects, such as subject content, creators, publishers, quality, structure, history, access rights and restrictions, relationship to other works or appropriate audience" (Efthimiadis and Carlyle 1997, 5).