Tony Gill <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>Danny Sullivan wrote:
[snip]
> http://searchenginewatch.com/
[snip]
> One survey found that 12% and 11% of web pages used those two tags,
> respectively. That sounds low, but those were actually the highest
> counts of any tags. Only usage of the generator tag approached those
> numbers (7.5%), and this tag is usually added automatically by
> authoring tools. Beyond these, other well-known tags include PICS
> (2.5%), a child-safe rating, and the content tag (2.2%), used to set
> the language character set of a web page.
I have just completed a survey (on 1st Nov 1997) of all the .uk WWW
site home pages (every http://www.site.domain.uk/ page) and one of
the elements I surveyed was the use of the <META> tag.
<META> was used in about 61% of all pages, split between the two forms:
77% <META NAME="..." CONTENT="...>
23% <META HTTP-EQUIV="..." CONTENT="...>
The top ten NAME values seen were:
1 Generator 26.73%
2 Keywords 24.54%
3 Description 22.06%
4 Author 6.58%
5 Formatter 6.27%
6 Template 1.26%
7 Distribution 1.19%
8 Resource-Type 1.10%
9 Robots 0.78%
10 Copyright 0.62%
Generator is dropped into the HTML created by the most popular HTML
composing tools (as an advert?).
The next two are the AltaVista-introduced metadata tags and overall
either are seen in 30% of <META> NAME form uses.
Dublin Core metadata (any DC.* names) are used in 0.11% with DC.Title
the most seen at 0.08%.
The top ten HTTP-EQUIV values seen were:
1 Content-Type 69.75%
2 Refresh 9.97%
3 Keywords 5.24%
4 PICS-Label 4.24%
5 Description 2.41%
6 Author 1.46%
7 Distribution 1.11%
8 Resource-Type 0.97%
9 Reply-To 0.84%
10 Expires 0.80%
Content-Type is most popular for the same reason as Generator.
These figures are not expressed as percents of all web pages but can
be converted (multiplying the first set of figures by 0.61*0.77 and
the second set by 0.61*0.23 then merging). This gives the following,
to nearest 1%:
Generator 12%
Keywords 12%
Description 11%
Content-Type 10%
Author 3%
Formatter 3%
Refresh 1%
(rest below 1%)
Since this is for home pages, rather than general web page content,
the results are probably still not quite comparable.
Ciao
Dave
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