I was at the COMDEX exhibition here (Vancouver) today, and
met very briefly with Paul Flaherty (the originator of AltaVista) folowing
his keynote address.
I posed the general question "what about metadata?" He said that they'd
used metadata more initially ("keywords" presumeably) but cut back
because of word spamming (for the uninitated, this is the practice of
putting "keywords = microsoft sex drugs music business ...." on your
pizza page, just to get hits).
He suggested that one might use some kind of crypto authentication to
validate metadata, but there wasn't time to discuss it properly.
I presume that when his search engine produces irrelevant hits, he gets
the blame, rather than the author of the page who has written all this
junk in black-on-black or fontsize -6 or whatever.
Andrew Daviel
