- From: Manar Hussain <manar@ivision.co.uk>
- Date: Tue, 18 Mar 1997 15:04:01 +0000 (GMT)
- To: meta2@mrrl.lut.ac.uk, www-talk@w3.org, se-dev@franz.ww.tu-berlin.de
>The *ONLY* way I can see out of this will be if at least one of the top 5 >or so search engines made a public announcement that they will search rank >sites using a high level meta-information standard *higher* with that >infomration than sites not using them. This would align the *market* >behind it because they *do* understand 'ranked high is GOOD' and will be >*motivated* to try then. You would then see pressure on the HTML editor >makers to include whatever standard the search engines were using - which >would bypass the general user incomprehension problem. I have to say that for decent adoption my inclination is to side with Benjamin's view .... that said maybe we can badger the search engines + there is a lot to be said for putting something in place that does address these issues for people who are sufficiently aware. We are coming up with this sort of thing for our own use for tagging information on our site and I'm sure we're not alone - if we all use a standard approach we can hope (a) to help eachother in this task by sharing the learning curve on how to do this well and (b) hope at some later point to much more readily be properly handled by public search engines etc ... In fact by demonstrating the system in action and the benefits it can acrue we might well hasten adoption/support by public search engines. For example our site which is most relevant for this sort of thing majors on web interfaced mailing lists which cause all sorts of problems for search engines that would require extra structural info to be properly resolved. I have heard from many users that they feel let down by public search engines on this aspect and can only expect the public search engines to wake up to this sooner rather than later .... let's be ready with the solution for when they come asking if we can't convince them to take on board the soltuion from the start :-> Manar
Received on Tuesday, 18 March 1997 10:04:05 UTC