I noticed that we lost (?) the META tags from Phase II. As a reminder, we had the titles of all the links in an article as META keywords, and the first paragraph (roughly;-) as META content.
Should we set this up again (more precise in Google hits)?
Magnus
Magnus Manske wrote:
I noticed that we lost (?) the META tags from Phase II. As a reminder, we had the titles of all the links in an article as META keywords, and the first paragraph (roughly;-) as META content.
Should we set this up again (more precise in Google hits)?
Sounds pretty cool to me.
(Magnus Manske magnus.manske@web.de): I noticed that we lost (?) the META tags from Phase II. As a reminder, we had the titles of all the links in an article as META keywords, and the first paragraph (roughly;-) as META content.
Should we set this up again (more precise in Google hits)?
"META" tags are all but useless, and only useful at all if they are carefully created by human evaluation and judgment. Any attempt to create automatic ones is not likely to produce any meaningful result.
On Fri, Mar 07, 2003 at 12:36:03PM -0600, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
(Magnus Manske magnus.manske@web.de): I noticed that we lost (?) the META tags from Phase II. As a reminder, we had the titles of all the links in an article as META keywords, and the first paragraph (roughly;-) as META content.
Should we set this up again (more precise in Google hits)?
"META" tags are all but useless, and only useful at all if they are carefully created by human evaluation and judgment. Any attempt to create automatic ones is not likely to produce any meaningful result.
That's not true ! Lot of search engines rely on meta tags. The only search engine we get lot of traffic from is Google (which ignores META tags). The rest are almost ignoring us and this is one of reasons.
"META" tags are all but useless, and only useful at all if they are carefully created by human evaluation and judgment. Any attempt to create automatic ones is not likely to produce any meaningful result.
That's not true ! Lot of search engines rely on meta tags. The only search engine we get lot of traffic from is Google (which ignores META tags). The rest are almost ignoring us and this is one of reasons.
That's one reason why Google is the only search engine that matters; they discovered long ago that META tags provided no useful information, so they evaluated pages on their own.
Information is only useful when it is honest and accurate. Because search-engine rankings are economically valuable, the natural incentive is to manipulate the self-descriptive information in META tags to achieve the result, rather than making them honest and accurate. Because of that, search engines that use META tags rank highly those who are most adept at manipulation, not those of most real value.
I would not oppose some means of allowing authors to add META tags that were honest and accurate and based on human judgment. But if we created META tags by some automated process just to get higher rankings on search engines that still use them, then we would be guilty of manipulation just as other advertisers are.
Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
I would not oppose some means of allowing authors to add META tags that were honest and accurate and based on human judgment. But if we created META tags by some automated process just to get higher rankings on search engines that still use them, then we would be guilty of manipulation just as other advertisers are.
I'm not sure there's anything inherently dishonest about creating meta keyword tags from linked words. Those keywords are real keywords for the article -- it seems like a pretty good proxy for what humans would enter into a separate field anyway, and yet it doesn't cost us any human labor.
I guess my question is: what's the downside? What's the harm? Generally being guilty of participating in something that other people manipulate unfairly doesn't strike me as a real downside.
--Jimbo
Jimmy Wales wrote:
I guess my question is: what's the downside? What's the harm?
The only thing would be that the HTML gets a little longer, as there's more information to transport.
As search engines are not logged in, and the META tags contain no information that would be displayed, we could add META tags for anons only, so logged-in users won't get the META tags.
Magnus
Meta-tag or similar solution would be very interesting of pages with words to translate to antoher languages.
I.e. imagine the Halloween phrase : "Trick or treat" ( or similar ). I would translate it directly to spanish "Truco o trato" using these metatags ( we don´t need an article about this "trick or treat" expression.
This is very interesting to understand another cultures.
Regards.
I would not oppose some means of allowing authors to add META tags that were honest and accurate and based on human judgment. But if we created META tags by some automated process just to get higher rankings on search engines that still use them, then we would be guilty of manipulation just as other advertisers are.
I'm not sure there's anything inherently dishonest about creating meta keyword tags from linked words. Those keywords are real keywords for the article -- it seems like a pretty good proxy for what humans would enter into a separate field anyway, and yet it doesn't cost us any human labor.
I guess my question is: what's the downside? What's the harm? Generally being guilty of participating in something that other people manipulate unfairly doesn't strike me as a real downside.
Fair enough; I agree there's little downside, especially if we did as Magnus suggests and send them only to anonymous browsers. But to me, the fact that article A links to article B doesn't actually tell us anything, and what it does tell us is already encoded in the mere fact that the link exists. Putting in extra META tags is merely repeating the same information in a different place. So we aren't "adding keywords" at all--we're just making longet HTML for the same information content.
I'd like to see some means of actually making more meaningful content. If an author were able, say, to see a list of links and choose, say, the top three or four, then /that/ would really be useful information. Then it's not just the fact that A links to B (which could be completely irrelevant, since we link everything here), it records the fact that some person thought that the link from A to B was important.
On Fri, Mar 07, 2003 at 02:04:54PM -0600, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
That's one reason why Google is the only search engine that matters; they discovered long ago that META tags provided no useful information, so they evaluated pages on their own.
Some people use Google, others use different search engines. Just because you don't use them doesn't mean they don't matter.
Information is only useful when it is honest and accurate.
Information is almost never completely honest nd accurate.
Because search-engine rankings are economically valuable, the natural incentive is to manipulate the self-descriptive information in META tags to achieve the result, rather than making them honest and accurate. Because of that, search engines that use META tags rank highly those who are most adept at manipulation, not those of most real value.
I would not oppose some means of allowing authors to add META tags that were honest and accurate and based on human judgment. But if we created META tags by some automated process just to get higher rankings on search engines that still use them, then we would be guilty of manipulation just as other advertisers are.
I'd use titles of pages linking to given article as meta keywords (if there are too many, get most important of them) and first paragraph or two (if first paragraph is too short) as meta description.
Programs should do that ! Humans aren't good at dealing with big amounts of data.
On Fri, 7 Mar 2003, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
I'd use titles of pages linking to given article as meta keywords (if there are too many, get most important of them) and first paragraph or two (if first paragraph is too short) as meta description.
Using pages linked to an article sounds like a bad idea, because it means that we should do one more search of the complete table of links for each page loaded. Therefore, it is a much better idea to use links from rather than links to the page. In validity of the resulting keywords the two methods don't differ much, I think, and the second is more economical on our resources.
Andre Engels
I would not oppose some means of allowing authors to add META tags that were honest and accurate and based on human judgment. But if we created META tags by some automated process just to get higher rankings on search engines that still use them, then we would be guilty of manipulation just as other advertisers are.
The process of adding links to an article is a lot like selecting keywords:
Stephen King is a [[horror]] [[author]] ...
Not using this information to make life easier for some search engines seems like a waste. On the other hand, I doubt that other search engines than Google really matter nowadays, and I agree that meta tags depend a lot on honesty, which makes them notoriously unreliable.
Regards,
Erik
I noticed that we lost (?) the META tags from Phase II. As a reminder, we had the titles of all the links in an article as META keywords, and the first paragraph (roughly;-) as META content.
Should we set this up again (more precise in Google hits)?
Seems reasonable, but the algorithm should only pick the first 20 links or so (some pages have hundreds of links). Perhaps it could be made a little smarter, counting the frequency of each link and using the most frequent ones, but I don't really know how common duplicate links are.
Also, at most 500 bytes of the first para should be used.
Regards,
Erik
Magnus Manske magnus.manske@web.de wrote in news:3E68DCED.3060104@web.de:
I noticed that we lost (?) the META tags from Phase II. As a reminder, we had the titles of all the links in an article as META keywords, and the first paragraph (roughly;-) as META content.
Should we set this up again (more precise in Google hits)?
Magnus
If it is done, please also include the LANG="XX" tag . So language specific search engines can find them better.
And what do you think about a auto-refresh for recent changes, 4 minutes?
"Pedro M.V." macv@interlap.com.ar wrote in news:000601c2e57d$e2c79ac0$ac5ecb51@megavia:
And what do you think about a auto-refresh for recent changes, 4 minutes?
The user could mark the box about it in Preferences. So, no problem. Better, a good thing ;)
Regards.
Why should that be yet a again a other option? A option only for this seems silly.
Soon there will be a need for a "basic user preferences" and "advanced user preferences"
Giskart wrote: Soon there will be a need for a "basic user preferences" and "advanced user
preferences"
No, but a new special page "Recent changes toys" ;-)
If we change the standard behaviour of Recent Changes, some people want a user option to change it back!
Also, a hundred unwatched Recent Pages auto-refreshing every few minutes might increase server load quite a bit.
Magnus
Pedro M.V. wrote:
And what do you think about a auto-refresh for recent changes, 4 minutes?
The user could mark the box about it in Preferences. So, no problem. Better, a good thing ;)
This doesn't seem like a good idea. It seems to me that it would stress the server for things that one doesn't really need. A person who goes to dinner for an hour with the recent changes page open will have uselessly sought to refresh 15 times.
Ec
On Sat, 08 Mar 2003 12:15:36 -0800, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Pedro M.V. wrote:
And what do you think about a auto-refresh for recent changes, 4 minutes?
The user could mark the box about it in Preferences. So, no problem. Better, a good thing ;)
This doesn't seem like a good idea. It seems to me that it would stress the server for things that one doesn't really need. A person who goes to dinner for an hour with the recent changes page open will have uselessly sought to refresh 15 times.
A good point. And redundant since there are browsers which will refresh a certain URL at a preset interval for you. For other browsers you could even use the likes of Proxomitron to write a meta refresh into the page as it reaches you. Just promise solemnly to close the page if you go to dinner!
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org