External Descriptions of Web Pages: Their Features and Their Relationships to Web Page Elements

Abstract

Fifteen sets of external descriptions of Web pages were examined for common phrases, general syntactic structure and content. For the seven largest sets, the value of meta tag descriptions and keywords, the first 200 characters of the body and text marked with common HTML tags as extracts helpful for writing external descriptions was estimated by applying two measures: density of external description words and density of two-word external description phrases. Syntactic patterns were found to vary between sets, with larger sets tending to be more internally consistent. Generally, titles showed the highest match densities (means between 50.6% and 69.4% for words and between 30.1% and 61.3% for phrases); match densities were also generally high for meta tag descriptions and for the first 200 words of the body, and low for text tagged A, with mixed results for keywords and for text tagged B, CENTER, or FONT.