A random sample of 628 Web pages registered with Yahoo! was analyzed for use of META tags and specifically the DESCRIPTION tag; 357 contained META tags and 163 used the DESCRIPTION tag. Some of the descriptions greatly exceeded typical length guidelines of 150 or 200 characters. A minority duplicated exactly phrasing found in the visible text; most repeated some words and phrases. Noun phrases were slightly more common than complete sentences. Content usually related to responsible corporate bodies and their products and services; information about the page or site itself was included in about one-third of descriptions.

Advice given in printed and web‐based sources on HTML META tags with NAME=‘DESCRIPTION ’is surveyed.To determin patterns of relationships among descriptions on the same site,links were followed automatically from 460 pages registered withYahoo! and previously found to contain descriptions.Sites where the registered page pointed to many other pages were significantly less likely to reuse the same description on those other pages; where different descriptions were used words from the registered page’s description tended to appear toward the beginnings of other descriptions.

Experimental subjects wrote abstracts of articles using a simplified version of the TEXNET abstracting assistance software. In addition to the full text, subjects were presented with either keywords or phrases extracted automatically. The resulting abstracts, and the times taken, were recorded automatically; some additional information was gathered by oral questionnaire. Selected abstracts produced were evaluated on various criteria by independent raters. Results showed considerable variation among subjects, but 37% found the keywords or phrases “quite” or “very” useful in writing their abstracts. Statistical analysis failed to support several hypothesized relations: phrases were not viewed as significantly more helpful than keywords; and abstracting experience did not correlate with originality of wording, approximation of the author abstract, or greater conciseness. Requiring further study are some unanticipated strong correlations including the following: Windows experience and writing an abstract like the author's; experience reading abstracts and thinking one had written a good abstract; gender and abstract length; gender and use of words and phrases from the original text. Results have also suggested possible modifications to the TEXNET software.

No abstract

Using four previously identified samples of Web pages containing meta-tagged descriptions, the value of meta-tagged keywords, the first 200 characters of the body, and text marked with common HTML tags as extracts helpful for writing summaries was estimated by applying two measures: density of description words and density of two-word description phrases. Generally, titles and keywords showed the highest densities. Parts of the body showed densities not much different from the body as a whole: somewhat higher for the first 200 characters and for text tagged with "center" and "font"; somewhat lower for text tagged with "a"; not significantly different for "table" and "div". Evidence of non-random clumping of description words in the body of some pages nevertheless suggests that further pursuit of automatic passage extraction methods from the body may be worthwhile. Implications of the findings for aids to summarization, and specifically the TexNet32 package, are discussed.