Empirical evaluation of one of the relationships between the user, search engines, metadata and Web sites in three- letter .com Web sites

M Weideman

doi:10.4102/sajim.v6i3.312

Abstract

Internet users often rely on search engines in an attempt to find relevant data on Web pages. Some Web pages contain metadata to enable search engines to categorize their contents more easily. As a result, a set of relationships exists between users, search engines, Web pages and metadata. One of these is the relationship between descriptionptive metadata on a Web page and the Web page itself. It was assumed that Web page authors make full use of metadata to increase the electronic visibility of their Web pages to Internet search engines. An empirical experiment has shown that the actual usage of a variety of metadata elements in a subset of randomly selected Web sites is surprisingly low. The overall average score for Web page visibility for this sample is 3, 75 out of 6. Not one of the selected Web pages contained any Dublin Core elements. One of the reasons for this low usage of metadata could be reluctance amongst search engine designers in recognizing metadata. Future research in this area could concentrate on some of the other relationships, as well as the implementation of the Dublin Core metadata elements.

Highlights

Empirical evaluation of one of the relationships between the user, search engines, metadata and Web sites in threeletter .com Web sites top
Many Internet users rely on search engines to find relevant data for a variety of purposes on a daily basis (Wallace, Kupperman and Krajcik 2000:75)
Lancaster predicted a change in the searching process, as it was known decades ago, when he described a future scenario in 1978: ‘The scientist of the year 2000 will use a terminal in many different ways: to receive, transmit, compose and search for text, seek answers to factual questions, build files and converse with colleagues

Summary

Introduction

Empirical evaluation of one of the relationships between the user, search engines, metadata and Web sites in threeletter .com Web sites top. Many Internet users rely on search engines to find relevant data for a variety of purposes on a daily basis (Wallace, Kupperman and Krajcik 2000:75). Lancaster predicted a change in the searching process, as it was known decades ago, when he described a future scenario in 1978:. ‘The scientist of the year 2000 will use a terminal in many different ways: to receive, transmit, compose and search for text, seek answers to factual questions, build files and converse with colleagues. The terminal provides a single entry to a wide range of capabilities that will substitute, wholly or in part, for many activities handled in different ways’ (Lancaster 1978:13). Over three decades ago Jackson found that engineers are reluctant to use information sources.

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