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.