Reviving the meta tags

Meta tags have been used for describing a website and its content. But the use of meta tags has declined so much so that they are considered dead. Very few sites seem to have retained the meta tags on their sites.

The new buzz word is bookmarking. So why not use meta tag data for bookmarking?

The main argument against meta tag content was that it included more keywords than the data contained in the site. The idea of bookmarking is that the user makes sure that the site actually contains that data. The user has to type in all the tags before bookmarking. Here is a greasymonkey script to find meta keywords and description and provide a simpy this link on top of the page.

Simpy this meta data

The user can choose which keywords are appropriate and which are not. And the user is spared the burden of having to type in the tags and description.

Google stops indexing live search

It is rather a surprise that finally google has stopped indexing Live search. In an earlier post about search engine indexing search engine, i had shown a screen shot to prove my point. Now the live search page does not appear as a result anymore.

Take a look at the googleoop - Google Search to see for yourself.

What is the reason for this sudden change? Is it only the algorithm kicking in late or something else? But they continue to index the various other things such as the ice rocket search engine, technorati etc..

They also index the various tagging services and aggregators. Is it too difficult to make out the difference or are these services faster than the google bot? Yes they are bound to be faster. After all its the wisdom of the crowds!!

That apart, the content stealors are better at the job as they generally parse through the XML only. It is indeed very difficult to index the web. The considerable size of the internet is to blame. The net is growing at a tremendous rate, propelled especially by the social networking sites that are exploding.

One piece of good news is that Orkut is not being indexed. But myspace is being indexed. So these social networks are having an impact on the search engines. Lets not forget bloggers here. The bloggeres are producing all sorts of search engine crap. The list could be endless..search engine link bombs, new word generation etc..