I'd also like to put in my two cents. We should remember that the
driving force behind the web, and search engines, is primarily commerce
and marketing. (If there are any doubts about this, please look at the
various sites devoted to increasing company standings in search engine
results)
As a result, the purpose of commercial web developers is to ensure that
their sites will be found in the first couple of screens at the most;
otherwise, why have them? Of course, this is understandable. If the CEO
at Purina does a search on "purina" and comes up no higher than 850 out
of 20,000, he/she is going to wonder why the company is spending all
that money for nothing.
The search engines want to cater to this, since this is where the money
is. They don't get much revenue from libraries. (How many ads have you
seen on Alta Vista for libraries? The closest is Amazon.com)
In contrast, libraries have traditionally striven to give equal access
to all materials and they do this in their catalogs using the rule of
"consistency". (Consistency in form of name, in description, in form of
subject, subject analysis, etc.)
My point is: the existing Web search engines owe their very existence to
business and commerce, not to libraries, and they will serve their
paying customers.
Businesses are not at all interested in equal access. Purina doesn't
care if someone can find the Alpo site, or Friskies, or any of their
other competitors. In fact, companies are suing over metadata right now.
See: http://searchenginewatch.internet.com/resources/metasuits.html
My favorite example is a professor who has written the definitive work
on Togo (the African nation). He puts in all the metadata, and follows
all of our instructions to the letter. He submits it to the search
engines and later complains: "My article is only 20,000 out of 80,000
and some stupid porno site comes up first!" This will be reality.
If our (librarians') dreams of metadata are going to work, we must give
up on Alta Vista, Yahoo, etc. and develop search engines that serve our
own needs (which include identifying, acquiring, selecting, describing,
arranging, storing, and retrieving).
Jim Weinheimer
Princeton University
[log in to unmask]
Weibel,Stu wrote:
>
> I'd like to add a couple of points on this subject.
>
> First, I think it is slightly skewed to think that the search engines as
> they now exist will have a major impact on the deployment of metadata on the
> net. They certainly could influence things, but I see several salient
> factors here:
>
> 1. Intentionally misleading, author-created metadata tags are already a
> problem on the net. So-called "Index Spamming" is intended to make it more
> likely for search engines to rank a resource high in a result set. I am
> given to understand that the search engines have ongoing efforts to filter
> such problems, but may pay less attention to metadata as a result of the
> difficulties this causes.
>
> 2. Point 1 notwithstanding, if I were a search engine developer, I would be
> reluctant to commit resources to accomodating meta tags until there was a
> clear business case for doing so. The amount of extant metadata embedded in
> resources is still quite low (this is, I think, at the root of Andrew's
> enquiry).
>
> 3. The quality and consistency of managed collections of metadata (provided
> by organizations with a clear interest in reliable metadata, such as
> libraries, museums, government agencies, publishers, etc.) is always likely
> to be higher than harvested metadata of unknown provenance. As Web business
> models evolve, I expect this quality differential to become increasingly
> important. It is already true. according to an article in Science magazine
> in early 1998, that none of the search systems cover more than about a third
> of publically available web resources. It is also interesting to note that
> the most popular service... Yahoo (sorry, but I can't bring myself to use
> the exclamation point)... is also the one with the smallest number of
> resources... a tiny fraction of the others. Why? Well, good marketing
> surely has helped them, but my judgement is that it is due to their use of a
> classification system (such as it is).
>
> Bring on the metadata.
>
> stu
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andrew Wilson [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Tuesday, November 24, 1998 7:07 PM
> To: 'DC'
> Subject: Search engines
>
> I have a general enquiry I'd like to throw open to the whole list. If
> this has been dealt with before, I apologise in advance for going over
> old ground.
>
> As understand it none of the search engines accessible on the web
> (Yahoo, Alta Vista, Excite, Infoseek, etc.) will actually read DC meta
> tags. Since its fairly obvious that search engines which use metadata
> will be critical to uptake and successful deployment of metadata schemas
> I'm wondering if there is any ongoing dialogue between the DC community
> and the search engine developers. Both communities are primarily based
> in North America so it would seem like a reasonable step. Can anyone
> tell me what is happening and how much progress has been made with
> getting search engine developers to start working on search engines that
> actually read and understand metadata embedded in web pages?
>
> thanks,
> Andrew Wilson
> National Archives of Australia
> Email: [log in to unmask]
> Ph: +61 2 6212 3694
> Fax: + 61 2 6212 3997
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