Metadata and web search

There is an abundance of information on the web but relevant information is becoming harder to find. There is a cost to an organisation if users or employees cannot find information they need. High quality searching is important so that users can find information quickly and easily and employees do not waste time and money looking for or recreating information. See:

• Feldman, Susan and Sherman, Chris (2001) "The high cost of not finding information" (IDC White paper), Available: http://www.knowledge-wave.com/scripts-include/en-us/downloads/idcinfo2996.pdf.
• Feldman, Susan (2004) "The high cost of not finding information" in KM World magazine v13, issue 3, Available: http://www.kmworld.com/ in the magazine archives.

HTML meta tags

Some public crawler-based web search engines support very little meta tagging while others do use metadata in different ways:

• meta tags can be used to boost the ranking of pages
• title tags are weighted more in some web indexes
• meta tags can discover pages which for various reasons lack text eg frames, tables, graphic image etc
• description meta tags provide better page summaries for display by the search engine
• structured data can also assist with searching across a site even though the site may not rank well in search engines
• meta robots tags can be used to specify that a particular page should not be indexed by a search engine although other conventions of blocking indexing could also be used
• search engines may also penalize pages or exclude a site if it has excessive metadata or if the same word is repeated too often in the metadata

More information is available at: How to use HTML meta tags on the Search Engine Watch website

Metadata repositories and search

Metadata records stored in metadata repositories locally can also be shared globally across communities of practice regardless of systems, networks and applications. They can support indexed discovery locally. They can also be exposed by data providers for harvesting via metadata harvesting protocols and then made available in global repositories for search and discovery.

Links (search engines and related articles)

• Search engine watch provides a comprehensive analysis of web search engines
  • Major search engines and directories
• Open Archives Initiative (OAI)
• Monash University Library Catalogue
• Panoptic CSIRO product, example of a search engine that uses a combination of metadata and full text indexing

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