Features of DESCRIPTION META tags in public home pages

Abstract

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.

Indexing and retrieval for the Web

“…Lawrence and Giles (1999) observed relatively low metadata use on the sites they sampled, with 34 percent using simple keyword and description metatags, and only 0.3 percent of sites used the Dublin Core Metadata Standard (http://www.dublincore.org/). On a random sample of Web pages generated by Yahoo!, Craven (2000) found that 57 percent used metatags and 26 percent used the DESCRIPTION metatag; however, only five of 628 sites used Dublin Core metadata elements.…”

“…orgl). On a random sample of Web pages generated by Yahoo!, Craven (2000) found that 57 percent used metatags and 26 percent used the DESCRIPTION metatag; however, only five of 628 sites used Dublin Core metadata elements.…”

The Design of an Automated Workflow for Metadata Generation

“…Downey [20] also suggests the development of tools for automated cataloguing such as a workflow, despite of its complexity. Finally, Greenberg et al [21] and Craven [22] propose a combination of automated and manual methods in order to produce quality documentation. This paper proposes a new workflow capable of maximizing the automation of the generation of metadata for geospatial data sets.…”

A Comparative analysis of user-generated and author-generated metadata for web resources

“…In age of Web 2.0, author described documents are promoted by HTML/XHTML. The keyword META tag is one of the most commonly used META tags (Craven, 2000), as it was supported and popularized by Internet search engines (e.g., Infoseek, AltaVista) in late 1990s and early 2000s.…”