Metadata - A great idea?

Metadata is a great idea. It will be even better when websites actually use it on a widespread basis. The statistics for .ie websites show how poorly meta data is used:

Websites With Title, Keywords and Description: 10460

That’s out of approximately 36198 .ie websites. There are significant opportunities for Search Engine Optimisation companies in Ireland, if only the owners of the websites can be convinced of the importance of SEO and its effects.

Metadata was great in the 1990s. Back then technology was expensive and it was a lot cheaper and easier for search engines to strip the meta data from a page and use it instead of the body text of the page. The falling cost of harddrive space and processing power changed all that and made it possible for search engines to cache complete copies of the webpages and implement better searching algorithms.

Google and its link based algorithm changed the emphasis from metadata to link structure. It was quite innovative but turned out to be as easily gamed as many other algorithms.

Now there is talk of the Semantic Web being the next big thing in search. Again this is another nice theoretical solution that ignores the reality of the patchy nature of the web. These “solutions” have to be easy to use. They have to be integrated an almost organic level in the web design programs.

It is over ten years since the appearance of the web’s first major search engines. Full metadata is still not included in the bulk of webpages. So what hope is there for the Semantic Web? Will it end up being an academic exercise in futility?

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Written by John McCormac on July 19th, 2005 with comments disabled.
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