META searching

[Roy Tennant]

When someone says a particular search engine supports meta tags, I take
that to mean that I can limit my search to one or more of those tags. But
in the case of the large, well known search engines, it merely means that
they may take keywords in one or more meta tags into consideration for
searching and ranking. As librarians (at least those of us on this list
who are), we should be clear about the distinction in our minds and in
what we say. 

Given that distinction, here are a few examples of search engines that
have true "meta tag support":

Subindexes of the Nordic Web Index:
Sweden:
http://gungner.ub2.lu.se/cgi-bin/egwcgi/57696/metaquery.egw;/-1+desire2.lub.lu.se:2124/swemeta

Denmark:
http://gungner.ub2.lu.se/cgi-bin/egwcgi/57697/metaquery.egw;/-1+nwi.dtv.dk:5555/md

The Queensland (Aus.) Government Metadata Search Engine:
http://www.dstc.edu.au/RDU/HotMeta/qld/search.html

Resource for Urban Design Information
http://rudi.herts.ac.uk/catsrch/catsrch.html

And of the software freely available for indexing your Web server, SWISH-E
is the only one of which I am aware that provides meta tag support:

http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/SWISH-E/

If anyone knows of another, please let me know. Thanks,
Roy Tennant

On Wed, 29 Jul 1998, Edward H. Summers wrote:

> Isidro:
> 
> A useful table that delineates search engine support for meta tags 
> can be found at SearchEngineWatch. The table has a section on MetaTag 
> Support, and it claims to have been updated as recently as June 17, 
> 1998. You can find it at: 
> http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/features.html
> 
> Also, here are two nice online 'articles' concerning meta tags:
> 
> MetaTagging for Search Engines 
> http://www.stars.com/Search/Meta/Tag.html
> 
> How to Use Meta Tags
> http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/meta.html
> 
> Hope this helps,
> Ed Summers
> Old Dominion University
> Norfolk, VA
>