www.wiley

Assinment 1

Class Notes

Color Cube

Page Check List

Home Page	Is there a Home Page Identity logo <title> Status Bar Message Total Links on Page Navigation Defined What is site about Who is site about What type of site is this Demographic Who are they What do they want How old are they How much $ do they have Expected type of computer Expected Browser AOL Compatible Is Entry prohibited in any way is entry harder annoying "Pop-Up" Messages Meta Tags Keywords Discription Copyright Browser check Plugg Ins Browser Check Version
Navigation	Styles of links Image Text Button Cohesive Redundant text links to image links <ALT> for images buttons maintains location and appearance throughout site Bread crumb navigation Banners
Other Pages on Site	Splash Page (text link entry) Shopping Cart Can people spend money here Easily Freebees Q and A FAQ Coupons Promotions Sales Information How to use products Subscription Contact Site Map Company Finical Information IS There an INDEX.HTM page in Every Folder
Images	No too many to compete with text Adds information Sized for good fit on page <ALT> height , width (( size (x)k )) good title for search engines Content Useful
Images as Links	Do they all work (updated) Do buttons look like buttons Good labels on buttons <ALT> good title for search engines Parallel text links Appearance of a LINK IMAGE MAP - Parallel Text Links
Text and Text Links	Do they all work (updated) Are the fonts available on all machine Are ALT face specified (PC + MAC) Useful or annoying text links in copy Underlined is always a LInk
Astetcies Color Fonts BgColor BgImage Animation Design / Look	Cross platform tested Anti Aliais Dithering 3 colors in a color family 3 or less fonts Rainbow text <blink> <marquee> Sound links Back ground sounds Respect the CREASE Less that 4 screen scrolls Is the written inforamation useful Professional look = level of commerce Visual and structural Theme Dose the design of the site help me understand the site Is there a Swoosh Do the graphic look right (embossing) Form and Function - Cane I find what I want Is copy in annoying columns 50% white space Image the right dimension for the site Do graphics have continuity Jargon or typos New Browser if going off site Careful use of color for the color blind Animations Sparse/Distracting Back Ground Image/Color Distracting Are color web safe Copyright Violation Copyrigt Statements Images and Text "Need to Be There"
Server	Cross Platform tested Did all parts download Load Time Forms / CGI Look at Source Code Dynamic Content PGP (pretty good protection) security Can Content be add logically
URL	Forwarded or registered Ownership
Printablity	Dose the page print well (550 pixels wide)
Code Scripts Java Scripts	JAVA Scripts Needed – concise – small Applets Serviette
Frames	Working Properly Home button on each frame <noFrames>
Search engines
Tables	Working Properly
Other	Would I go Back
Getting Started Introduction How do search engines use META tags? How do I use them? Common Tags META - Description META - Keywords META - Robots HTML - Title Special Tags META -Refresh META - Target META - Author / Copyright Wrap Up	http://www.awakemm.com/christopher/knowledge/metatags/iuse.html

SPLASH PAGES

Would you do this?

You sell an expensive product.

You walk into a potential client's office for the first time, introduce yourself, and place an information packet in front of the client.

As you start to make your big presentation, the client reaches into the packet, extracts the contract you hope he'll sign and grabs a pen.

As the client starts to sign the lucrative, long-term contract, you reach over across the table, grab the client by the throat, and yell "Not so fast, jerk face, I haven't finished my presentation!!!"

You wouldn't do that, would you? Then why are you using splash pages because they're the Web equivalent of the example above. The golden rule of doing business on the Web is "Don't do anything that gets in the way of the sale." Splash pages get in the way because they're an extra layer between your visitor and your site.

I try to tell clients that Web design should reflect the real world and you don't see "splash pages" in the real world. Think about Wal-Mart. When you go to Wal-Mart are you forced to wait at the front door and watch a thirty-second movie before you're allowed to enter the store? No. Then why would you make your visitors wait to get inside your Web site?

Not everyone agrees with my position about splash pages. I recently gave a speech to a group of 50 executives. One of them complained, "But we're trying to establish a brand and our splash page is our branding mechanism." I retorted, "OK, what kind of brand does your 693K Flash splash page establish? It says, 'I don't care about how long you have to wait I want to impress you with how cool a company we are.'" You have to remember that nobody will write you a check because you have a cool splash page. Nobody.

What do I tell my boss?

I'm frequently asked, "My boss is color blind, he likes shiny things and he's a moron -- how can I convince him not to use splash pages?" Simple. Whenever you see a design element --and a splash page is a great example -- that you think should be eliminated ask you boss this question: "Would Amazon.com use this design element? No? Well, they've spent millions of dollars on their Web site in an effort to make it easy-to-use so if they don't use a splash page, there must be a pretty good reason."

If your boss still doesn't get it, well...

META TAGS

With all the new HTML tags that are coming out, it’s easy to overlook some of the greatest tools in our arsenal of HTML tricks. There are still a few HTML goodies lying around that’ll help you keep your pages more up to date, make them easier to find, and even stop them from becoming framed. What’s more, some of these tags have been with us since the first Web browsers were released.

META tags can be very useful for Web developers. They can be used to identify the creator of the page, what HTML specs the page follows, the keywords and description of the page, and the refresh parameter (which can be used to cause the page to reload itself, or to load another page). And these are just a few of the common uses!

First, there are two types of META tags: HTTP-EQUIV and META tags with a NAME attribute.

HTTP-EQUIV
META HTTP-EQUIV tags are the equivalent of HTTP headers. To understand what headers are, you need to know a little about what actually goes on when you use your Web browser to request a document from a Web server. When you click on a link for a page, the Web server receives your browser's request via HTTP. Once the Web server has made sure that the page you’ve requested is indeed there, it generates an HTTP response. The initial data in that response is called the "HTTP header block." The header tells the Web browser information which may be useful for displaying this particular document

Back to META tags. Just like normal headers, META HTTP-EQUIV tags usually control or direct the actions of Web browsers, and are used to further refine the information which is provided by the actual headers. HTTP-EQUIV tags are designed to affect the Web browser in the same manner as normal headers. Certain Web servers may translate META HTTP-EQUIV tags into actual HTTP headers automatically so that the user’s Web browser would simply see them as normal headers. Some Web servers, such as Apache and CERN httpd, use a separate text file which contains meta-data. A few Web server-generated headers, such as "Date," may not be overwritten by META tags, but most will work just fine with a standard Web server.

NAME
META tags with a NAME attribute are used for META types which do not correspond to normal HTTP headers. This is still a matter of disagreement among developers, as some search engine agents (worms and robots) interpret tags which contain the keyword attribute whether they are declared as "name" or "http-equiv," adding fuel to the fires of confusion

Using META Tags

On to more important issues, like how to actually implement META tags in your Web pages. If you’ve ever had readers tell you that they’re seeing an old version of your page when you know that you’ve updated it, you may want to make sure that their browser isn’t caching the Web pages. Using META tags, you can tell the browser not to cache files, and/or when to request a newer version of the page. In this article, we’ll cover some of the META tags, their uses, and how to implement them.

Expires
This tells the browser the date and time when the document will be considered "expired." If a user is using Netscape Navigator, a request for a document whose time has "expired" will initiate a new network request for the document. An illegal Expires date such as "0" is interpreted by the browser as "immediately." Dates must be in the RFC850 format, (GMT format):
<META HTTP-EQUIV="expires" CONTENT="Wed, 26 Feb 1997 08:21:57 GMT">

Pragma
This is another way to control browser caching. To use this tag, the value must be "no-cache". When this is included in a document, it prevents Netscape Navigator from caching a page locally.
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache">

These two tags can be used as together as shown to keep your content current—but beware. Many users have reported that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer refuses the META tag instructions, and caches the files anyway. So far, nobody has been able to supply a fix to this "bug." As of the release of MSIE 4.01, this problem still existed.

Refresh
This tag specifies the time in seconds before the Web browser reloads the document automatically. Alternatively, it can specify a different URL for the browser to load.
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="0;URL=http://www.newurl.com">

Be sure to remember to place quotation marks around the entire CONTENT attribute’s value, or the page will not reload at all.

Set-Cookie
This is one method of setting a "cookie" in the user’s Web browser. If you use an expiration date, the cookie is considered permanent and will be saved to disk (until it expires), otherwise it will be considered valid only for the current session and will be erased upon closing the Web browser.
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Set-Cookie" CONTENT="cookievalue=xxx;expires=Wednesday, 21-Oct-98 16:14:21 GMT; path=/">

Window-target
This one specifies the "named window" of the current page, and can be used to prevent a page from appearing inside another framed page. Usually this means that the Web browser will force the page to go the top frameset.
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Window-target" CONTENT="_top">

PICS-Label
Although you may not have heard of PICS-Label (PICS stands for Platform for Internet Content Selection), you probably will soon. At the same time that the Communications Decency Act was struck down, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was working to develop a standard for labeling online content (see www.w3.org/PICS/ ). This standard became the Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS). The W3C’s standard left the actual creation of labels to the "labeling services." Anything which has a URL can be labeled, and labels can be assigned in two ways. First, a third party labeling service may rate the site, and the labels are stored at the actual labeling bureau which resides on the Web server of the labeling service. The second method involves the developer or Web site host contacting a rating service, filling out the proper forms, and using the HTML META tag information that the service provides on their pages. One such free service is the PICS-Label generator that Vancouver-Webpages provides. It is based on the Vancouver Webpages Canadian PICS ratings, version 1.0, and can be used as a guideline for creating your own PICS-Label META tag.

Although PICS-Label was designed as a ratings label, it also has other uses, including code signing, privacy, and intellectual property rights management. PICS uses what is called generic and specific labels. Generic labels apply to each document whose URL begins with a specific string of characters, while specific labels apply only to a given file. A typical PICS-Label for an entire site would look like this:
<META http-equiv="PICS-Label" content='(PICS-1.1 "http://vancouver-webpages.com/VWP1.0/" l gen true comment "VWP1.0" by "scott@hisdomain.com" on "1997.10.28T12:34-0800" for "http://www.hisdomain.com/" r (P 2 S 0 SF -2 V 0 Tol -2 Com 0 Env -2 MC -3 Gam -1 Can 0 Edu -1 ))'>

Keyword and Description attributes
Chances are that if you manually code your Web pages, you’re aware of the "keyword" and "description" attributes. These allow the search engines to easily index your page using the keywords you specifically tell it, along with a description of the site that you yourself get to write. Couldn’t be simpler, right? You use the keywords attribute to tell the search engines which keywords to use, like this:
<META NAME ="keywords" CONTENT="life, universe, mankind, plants, relationships, the meaning of life, science">

By the way, don’t think you can spike the keywords by using the same word repeated over and over, as most search engines have refined their spiders to ignore such spam. Using the META description attribute, you add your own description for your page:
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="This page is about the meaning of life, the universe, mankind and plants.">

Make sure that you use several of your keywords in your description. While you are at it, you may want to include the same description enclosed in comment tags, just for the spiders that do not look at META tags. To do that, just use the regular comment tags, like this:
<!--// This page is about the meaning of life, the universe, mankind and plants. //--!>

More about search engines can be found in our special report.

ROBOTs in the mist
On the other hand, there are probably some of you who do not wish your pages to be indexed by the spiders at all. Worse yet, you may not have access to the robots.txt file. The robots META attribute was designed with this problem in mind.
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="all | none | index | noindex | follow | nofollow">

The default for the robot attribute is "all". This would allow all of the files to be indexed. "None" would tell the spider not to index any files, and not to follow the hyperlinks on the page to other pages. "Index" indicates that this page may be indexed by the spider, while "follow" would mean that the spider is free to follow the links from this page to other pages. The inverse is also true, thus this META tag:
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT=" noindex">

would tell the spider not to index this page, but would allow it to follow subsidiary links and index those pages. "nofollow" would allow the page itself to be indexed, but the links could not be followed. As you can see, the robots attribute can be very useful for Web developers. For more information about the robot attribute, visit the W3C’s robot paper.

Placement of META tags
META tags should always be placed in the head of the HTML document between the actual <HEAD> tags, before the BODY tag. This is very important with framed pages, as a lot of developers tend to forget to include them on individual framed pages. Remember, if you only use META tags on the frameset pages, you'll be missing a large number of potential hits.

Obscure META Tags

We’ve covered most of the popular and useful META tags, but what about the obscure ones that you hardly see, such as Dublin Core or rating?

If you’re a normal person (I’m not, and I don’t know any, but I heard they do exist), then you’re wondering just what, exactly, is Dublin Core? No, it’s not an Irish porno movie, but rather, it’s a simple resource description record that has come to be known as the Dublin Core Metadata element set, or rather, Dublin Core.

Thanks to a considerate reader, we now know how it got its name. Dublin Core is the core set of metadata elements which were identified by a working group (comprised of experts drawn from the library and Internet communities) which met in Dublin, Ohio.

Dublin Core was designed with several issues in mind, namely to:

enable search engines to filter by standard fields, i.e. date and author
Browsers could have the ability to display metadata fields in a separate window
enhance cross-collection, repurposing and integrating of content
enhance site management, as old pages may be located more easily, etc.

If you want to see what an actual Dublin Core META tag looks like, you can use Vancouver Webpages’ Dublin Core META tag generator.

Rating is basically the same thing as PICS-Label, and can be used for the same purpose, but PICS-Label is recommended over rating, as it is currently recognized by more software than rating, although it couldn’t hurt to use both.

Many of the obscure META tags are produced by HTML authoring software. Microsoft Word supports a number of META attributes in its HTML export option, and if you create a document with Internet Assistant, FrontPage, etc, you’ll notice that they automatically insert certain META tags, such as Generator, Content-Type, etc. into the Web page source. Other META tags are organization or search engine specific. The RDU Metadata search engine uses many such tags, including: contributor, custodian, east_bounding_coordinate, north_bounding_coordinate and others. Other obscurities are government META tags, useful only if you are within a government intranet or system.

But then
Statistics show that only about 21% of Web pages use keyword and description META tags. If you use them and your competitor doesn’t, that’s one in your favor. If your competitor is using them and you aren’t, you may now consider yourself armed with the knowledge. META tags are something that visitors to your Web site are usually not aware of, but ironically, a lot of times it was those same META tags which enabled them to find you in the first place. So for goodness’ sake, don’t tell anyone about this….let’s just keep this our own little secret (just kidding...make sure to send this URL to everyone you know!).

The Law
Before we leave the topic of META tags, keep in mind that there are several legal issues that surround the use of these tags on your Web site. Danny Goodman, editor of SearchEngineWatch, has put together a page detailing the lawsuits brought on revolving around META tags. At the present time there have already been at least five such suits, mainly focused on sites that utilized someone else's keywords within their META tags. The largest of these suits brought a settlement of $3 million dollars. Bottom line: use your own keywords, and definitely not words that someone else has a copyright on.

For additional META information, be sure to check out the WebDeveloper.com META Tag Resource Page, as well as Galactus' META info page, and Vancouver's own META tag page. If you’d like some assistance creating the META tags, check out Andrew Daviel’s form-based META tag generator.

There are lots of things you should and shouldn’t do to your Meta tags. Below are ten ways that could help your search engine rankings just by optimizing your Meta tags.

1. Don't stuff every word you can think of in your keyword tag. Search engines can penalize you for this by giving you poor rankings. Keep between 10 - 15 keywords/phrases; too many can dilute the effectiveness of your keywords/phrases.

2. Don't put words in your keyword tag that have nothing to do with your site. If caught (and most are) you can be penalized.

3. Don't repeat the same keyword more than 3 times in your tags (esp. the keywords tag), including words in all tenses, for example: run, running, ran. Search engine robots and spiders can pick those kinds of things out. The more you repeat, the less effective the word becomes when it comes time for the search engine to rank your site.

4. Don't exceed the maximum number of characters or words for your title, description and keyword tags.

5. I wouldn't use Meta refresh tags on pages you plan to submit to search engines/directories. Some search engines, like Infoseek, may not index or may give you a poor ranking on their search engine. Infoseek especially, is one who likes to follow links by itself, it doesn't like to be taken somewhere automatically.

6. Your title and description tags are very important also. I would suggest that you put your main keywords and phrases in these tags.

7. Use keyword phrases between 2 to 3 words long. One word keywords tend to be more competitive and aren’t usually as effective.

8. Place your most important keywords/phrases at the beginning of your title and keyword tags.

9. It's a good idea that your title tag is the first tag in-between the body tags on your pages.

10. Last tip, if you have a page that you don't want to be indexed, use this tag:

META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX"

However, not all search engines support this tag. A way around this is to use the robots.txt convention of blocking indexing; most of your major search engines support this.

With a little bit of time and elbow grease you just might be able to turn a sluggish page into a major traffic hub! Do be aware that each search engine is different, so what might work on one, might not work on the other. You might have to change your keywords around a few times in a different order to get the results your looking for. Of course, Meta tags aren’t the only way to help get your site ranked high, but they're a good start.

Meta Tage Generator http://www.drclue.net/F1.cgi/HTML/META/META.html

<head>

<title>title ...words</title>

<meta name="resource-type" content="document">
<meta name="distribution" content="GLOBAL">
<meta name="description" content="Discribe yr site">
<meta name="copyright" content="year">
<meta name="keywords" content="words">
<meta name="author" content="your name">
<meta http-equiv="Reply-To" content="e-mail here">
<meta http-equiv="content-type:" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en">

</head>

http://searchenginewatch.com/

http://www.forrealfree.com/

http://www.internetday.com/archives/050699.html à

Search engines are not built to be the same; that is, the reason that your page is ranked high in one search engine, does not guarantee high position on the others. I would like to reveal the secrets of the major search engines.

Link popularity

Search engines like Excite, Infoseek and Lycos will check how many links there are to your site from others. Links boost the placement of the ranking. Infoseek has a more complex link popularity system which places emphasis on linking site status and relevancy.

Domain Name

The use of keywords in domain names is favored by Altavista, Hotbot, Infoseek, Lycos and Webcrawlers. Keywords in subdomain (secondary) names help too. Do not lump keywords together; separate words by dashes.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are always mentioned when it comes to search engine optimization. To a certain extent, it has been misunderstood that meta tags help in boosting rank postings. AltaVista, Excite, Lycos, Netfind, NorthernLights and WebCrawler have low regard for meta tags and words or text in meta tags. Hence, they will not boost you in these search engines.

Invisible and Tiny Text

Excite is the most "spamable" search engine. It will index invisible and tiny text. Webcrawler and Netfind allow invisible text and Infoseek and NothernLights will index tiny words. Invisible text (to web browsers) can be achieved by specifying foreground and background in the same color. Tiny sized text is placing text on a page in a small font size. A page with predominantly heavy tiny text will be treated as spam by Altavista, HotBot, Lycos, MSN and Webcrawler and they will refuse to index heavily tiny texted web pages.

Index Comments and ALT

Some web page designers insert keywords or phrases in various parts of the web, wanting to give a boost to the keywords. Not all search engines recognise comment as keywords; only HotBot does. ALT text for images is another trick commonly used. However, only AltaVista, InfoSeek and Lycos index ALT text.

Stemming

Infoseek, Lycos and NorthernLights will also search for variations of a word based on its stem. For example, searching for the word "optimization" will result in pages containing "optimize" or "optimizes".

Case Sensitive

AltaVista is the search engine that is case sensitive. If you search for the phrase "search engine optimization" you would get a completely different result than from "search engines optimization".

Consistency

Consistency of keywords throughout the page is viewed as important by Altavista, Hotbot and Webcrawler. Hence, keywords have to be spread over the web page, particularly at the bottom.

That is all for today, folks. If I discover more, I will share with you again

However, new HTTP headers should not be created without checking for conflict with existing ones since it is possible to interfere with server and proxy operation.

Content-Disposition

Source: RFC2183 - Specify application handler (Microsoft), e.g.

Content-Type: text/comma-separated-values
Content-Disposition: inline; filename=openinexcel.csv

Expires

Source: HTTP/1.1 (RFC2068)

The date and time after which the document should be considered expired. Controls cacheing in HTTP/1.0. In Netscape Navigator, a request for a document whose expires time has passed will generate a new network request (possibly with If-Modified-Since). An illegal Expires date, e.g. "0", is interpreted as "now". Setting Expires to 0 may thus be used to force a modification check at each visit.

Web robots may delete expired documents from a search engine, or schedule a revisit.

Dates must be given in RFC850 format, in GMT. E.g. (META tag):

<META HTTP-EQUIV="expires" CONTENT="Wed, 26 Feb 1997 08:21:57 GMT">

or (HTTP header):

Expires: Wed, 26 Feb 1997 08:21:57 GMT

In HTTP 1.0, an invalid value (such as "0") may be used to mean "immediately".

Note: While the Expires HTML META tag appears to work properly with Netscape Navigator, other browsers may ignore it, and it is ignored by Web proxies. Use of the equivalent HTTP header, as supported by e.g. Apache, is more reliable.

See also CacheNow for discussion about cache control, page expiry, etc.

Pragma

Controls cacheing in HTTP/1.0. Value must be "no-cache". Issued by browsers during a Reload request, and in a document prevents Netscape Navigator cacheing a page locally.

Content-Type

Source: HTTP/1.0 (RFC1945)

The HTTP content type may be extended to give the character set. As an HTTP/1.0 header, this unfortunately breaks older browsers. As a META tag, it causes Netscape Navigator to load the appropriate charset before displaying the page. E.g.

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=ISO-2022-JP">

Content-Script-Type

E.g.

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Script-Type" CONTENT="text/javascript">

Source: HTML 4.0

Specifies the default scripting language in a document. See MIMETYPES for applicable values.

Content-Style-Type

E.g.

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Style-Type" CONTENT="text/css">

Source: HTML 4.0

Specifies the default style sheet language for a document.

Content-Language

Source: HTTP/1.0, RFC1766

May be used to declare the natural language of the document. May be used by robots to categorize by language. The corresponding Accept-Language header (sent by a browser) causes a server to select an appropriate natural language document. E.g.

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Language" CONTENT="en-GB">

or (HTTP header)

Content-language: en-GB

languages are specified as the pair (language-dialect); here, English-British

Refresh

Source: Netscape

Specifies a delay in seconds before the browser automatically reloads the document. Optionally, specifies an alternative URL to load. E.g.

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="3;URL=http://www.some.org/some.html">

or (HTTP header)

Refresh: 3;URL=http://www.some.org/some.html

In Netscape Navigator, has the same effect as clicking "Reload"; i.e. issues an HTTP GET with Pragma: no-cache (and If-Modified-Since header if a cached copy exists).

Note: If a script is executed which reloads the current document, the action of the Refresh tag may be undefined. (e.g. <body onLoad= "document.location='otherdoc.doc'>)

Window-target

Source: Jahn Rentmeister

Specifies the named window of the current page; can be used to stop a page appearing in a frame with many (not all) browsers. E.g.

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Window-target" CONTENT="_top">

or (HTTP header)

Window-target: _top

Ext-cache

Source: Netscape

Defines the name of an alternate cache to Netscape Navigator. E.g.

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Ext-cache" 
CONTENT="name=/some/path/index.db; instructions=User Instructions">

Set-Cookie

Source: Netscape Navigator

Sets a "cookie" in Netscape Navigator. Values with an expiry date are considered "permanent" and will be saved to disk on exit. E.g.

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Set-Cookie" 
CONTENT="cookievalue=xxx;expires=Friday, 31-Dec-99 23:59:59 GMT; path=/">

PICS-Label

Source: PICS

Platform-Independant Content rating Scheme. Typically used to declare a document's rating in terms of adult content (sex, violence, etc.) although the scheme is very flexible and may be used for other purposes.

See also the PICS HOWTO. For PICS for Medical data, see medpics.org.

Cache-Control

Source: HTTP/1.1

Specifies the action of cache agents. Possible values:

Public - may be cached in public shared caches
Private - may only be cached in private cache
no-cache - may not be cached
no-store - may be cached but not archived

Note that browser action is undefined using these headers as META tags.

Vary

Source: HTTP/1.1

Specifies that alternates are available. E.g.

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Vary" CONTENT="Content-language">

or (HTTP header)

Vary: Content-language

implies that if a header Accept-Language is sent an alternate form may be selected.

Lotus

The Lotus publishing tool generates Bulletin-Date and Bulletin-Text attributes. Bulletin-Text contains a document description.

NAME attributes

META tags with a name attribute are used for other types which do not correspond to HTTP headers. Sometimes the distinction is blurred; some agents may interpret tags such as "keywords" declared as either "name" or as "http-equiv".

Robots

Source: Spidering

Controls Web robots on a per-page basis. E.g.

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,FOLLOW">

Robots may traverse this page but not index it.

Altavista supports:

NOINDEX prevents anything on the page from being indexed.
NOFOLLOW prevents the crawler from following the links on the page and indexing the linked pages.
NOIMAGEINDEX prevents the images on the page from being indexed but the text on the page can still be indexed.
NOIMAGECLICK prevents the use of links directly to the images, instead there will only be a link to the page.

Description

Source: Spidering, AltaVista, Infoseek.

A short, plain language description of the document. Used by search engines to describe your document. Particularly important if your document has very little text, is a frameset, or has extensive scripts at the top. E.g.

<META NAME="description" CONTENT="Citrus fruit wholesaler.">

Keywords

Source: AltaVista, Infoseek.

Keywords used by search engines to index your document in addition to words from the title and document body. Typically used for synonyms and alternates of title words. E.g.

<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="oranges, lemons, limes">

Author

Source: Publishing tools, e.g. Netscape Gold

Typically the unqualified author's name.

Generator

Source: Publishing tools, e.g. Netscape Gold, FrontPage, etc.

Typically the name and version number of a publishing tool used to create the page. Could be used by tool vendors to assess market penetration.

Formatter

Source: Publishing tools - Microsoft FrontPage

Classification

Source: Netscape Gold

Undefined.

Copyright

Source: Publishing tools

Typically an unqualified copyright statement.

Rating

Source: mk-metas, Weburbia (safe for kids)

Simple content rating.

VW96.ObjectType

Source: mk-metas

Based on an early version of the Dublin Core report, using a defined schema of document types such as FAQ, HOWTO.

Defined by Queen's University of Belfast; a restricted set including e.g. "Contact Information", "Image".

Dublin Core

DC.TITLE, DC.CREATOR, DC.SUBJECT , DC.DESCRIPTION , DC.PUBLISHER , DC.CONTRIBUTORS , DC.DATE , DC.TYPE, DC.FORMAT , DC.IDENTIFIER, DC.SOURCE , DC.LANGUAGE , DC.RELATION, DC.COVERAGE, DC.RIGHTS

Dublin Core Elements. See the Reference Description

HTML 4.0

The HTML 4.0 Specification is now available.

HTdig

htdig-keywords, htdig-noindex

HTdig tags. See the HTdig META page.

DC-CHEM

DC-CHEM. See Chemical Metadata extensions.

HTdig notification

htdig-email, htdig-notification-date, htdig-email-subject - see HTdig notification.

searchBC

searchBC is a regional search engine which uses a number of common tags such as Keywords. revisit is used as a hint for scheduling revisits.

Apple META tags

Author-Corporate, Author-Personal, Author-Personal, Publisher-Email, Identifier-URL, Identifier, Coverage, Bookmark -

Kodak

EKBU, EKdocType, EKdocOwner, EKdocTech, EKreviewDate, EKArea - as used by Eastman Kodak.

IBM

ABSTRACT, CC, ALIAS, OWNER - as used by IBM.

Page-Enter, Page-Exit, Site-Enter, Site-Exit

Source: Microsoft DHTML (Filters & Transitions)

Defines special effects transition; e.g.

<meta http-equiv="Page-Enter"
content="revealTrans(Duration=3.0,Transition=2)">

See e.g. Transitions Between Pages (Ruleweb)

SHOE

Instance-Delegate, Instance-Key - see the SHOE Project at the University of Maryland (Simple HTML Ontology Extensions)

Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word 97 supports a number of HTML META attributes in the HTML export option. Content-Type is used to set the charset, Generator is set and various other tags may optionally be set.

SIC87

1987 US SIC (Standard Industry Codes), used in Vancouver Webpages Classifieds. See US SIC Codes

RDU

The Metadata Search Engine lists many tags, including the following:

contributor
custodian
custodian_contact
custodian_contact_position
east_bounding_coordinate
north_bounding_coordinate
relation
reply-to
south_bounding_coordinate
west_bounding_coordinate

Other Organisations

DMV MetaData for Mathematical Papers
Maple Square (ex. Sympatico)

Agent Markup Language

See the AML pages.

Agent markup Language Version

GeoCities

See GeoCities categorize.

GILS

Government Information Locator Service - a US government initiative. See

Washington GILS metadata attribute set
GILS profile (version 2)

IMS

See the IMS Project homepage.

Dictionary

Fireball

The German search engine Fireball. See the metadata page and meta-tag generator. Supports Author, Publisher, Keywords, Description plus page-topic, page-type.

Geotags

Geographic Tagging for Resource Discovery.

Geo.Region - Geographic regions from ISO3166-2
Geo.Placename - Free Text place name
Geo.Position - Latitude;Longitude in decimal degrees using the WGS84 datum.

Miscellaneous

Version
Template
Operator
Creation
Host
Document
Subject
Build
Distribution - global,local, iu
Resource-type - document (for ALIWeb)
Location (geographic location; from Sympatico)

Deprecated:

Random Text (e.g., META NAME="Tom Jones

Search Engines

For the latest news and reviews about these services, see the Search Engine Report archives.

Results 1 - 24 of 24
AOL Search
AOL Search allows its members to search across the web and AOL's own content from one place. The "external" version, listed above, does not list AOL content. The main listings for categories and web sites come from the Open Directory (see below). Inktomi (see below) also provides crawler-based results, as backup to the directory information. Before the launch of AOL Search in October 1999, the AOL search service was Excite-powered AOL NetFind.

AltaVista
AltaVista is consistently one of the largest search engines on the web, in terms of pages indexed. Its comprehensive coverage and wide range of power searching commands makes it a particular favorite among researchers. It also offers a number of features designed to appeal to basic users, such as "Ask AltaVista" results, which come from Ask Jeeves (see below), and directory listings from the Open Directory and LookSmart. AltaVista opened in December 1995. It was owned by Digital, then run by Compaq (which purchased Digital in 1998), then spun off into a separate company which is now controlled by CMGI. AltaVista also operates the Raging Search service, below.

Ask Jeeves
Ask Jeeves is a human-powered search service that aims to direct you to the exact page that answers your question. If it fails to find a match within its own database, then it will provide matching web pages from various search engines. The service went into beta in mid-April 1997 and opened fully on June 1, 1997. Some results from Ask Jeeves also appear within AltaVista.

Direct Hit
Direct Hit measures what people click on in the search results presented at its own site and at its partner sites, such as HotBot. Sites that get clicked on more than others rise higher in Direct Hit's rankings. Thus, the service dubs itself a "popularity engine." Aside from running its own web site, Direct Hit provides the main results which appear at HotBot (see below) and is available as an option to searchers at MSN Search. Direct Hit is owned by Ask Jeeves (above). See the Using Direct Hit Results page to learn more about Direct Hit.

Excite
Excite is one of the more popular search services on the web. It offers a fairly large index and integrates non-web material such as company information and sports scores into its results, when appropriate. Excite was launched in late 1995. It grew quickly in prominence and consumed two of its competitors, Magellan in July 1996, and WebCrawler in November 1996. These continue to run as separate services.

FAST Search
Formerly called All The Web, FAST Search aims to index the entire web. It was the first search engine to break the 200 million web page index milestone and consistently has one of the largest indexes of the web. The Norwegian company behind FAST Search also powers some of the results that appear at Lycos (see below). FAST Search launched in May 1999.

Go / Infoseek
Go is a portal site produced by Infoseek and Disney. It offers portal features such as personalization and free e-mail, plus the search capabilities of the former Infoseek search service, which has now been folded into Go. Searchers will find that Go consistently provides quality results in response to many general and broad searches, thanks to its ESP search algorithm. It also has an impressive human-compiled directory of web sites. Go officially launched in January 1999. It is not related to GoTo, below. The former Infoseek service launched in early 1995.

GoTo
Unlike the other major search engines, GoTo sells its main listings. Companies can pay money to be placed higher in the search results, which GoTo feels improves relevancy. Non-paid results come from Inktomi. GoTo launched in 1997 and incorporated the former University of Colorado-based World Wide Web Worm. In February 1998, it shifted to its current pay-for-placement model and soon after replaced the WWW Worm with Inktomi for its non-paid listings. GoTo is not related to Go (Infoseek).

Google
Google is a search engine that makes heavy use of link popularity as a primary way to rank web sites. This can be especially helpful in finding good sites in response to general searches such as "cars" and "travel," because users across the web have in essence voted for good sites by linking to them. The system works so well that Google has gained wide-spread praise for its high relevancy. Google also has a huge index of the web and provides some results to Yahoo and Netscape Search.

HotBot
HotBot is a favorite among researchers due to its many power searching features. In most cases, HotBot's first page of results comes from the Direct Hit service (see above), and then secondary results come from the Inktomi search engine, which is also used by other services. It gets its directory information from the Open Directory project (see below). HotBot launched in May 1996 as Wired Digital's entry into the search engine market. Lycos purchased Wired Digital in October 1998 and continues to run HotBot as a separate search service.

IWon
Backed by US television network CBS, iWon has a directory of web sites generated automatically by Inktomi, which also provides its more traditional crawler-based results. iWon gives away daily, weekly and monthly prizes in a marketing model unique among the major services. It launched in Fall 1999.

Inktomi
Originally, there was an Inktomi search engine at UC Berkeley. The creators then formed their own company with the same name and created a new Inktomi index, which was first used to power HotBot. Now the Inktomi index also powers several other services. All of them tap into the same index, though results may be slightly different. This is because Inktomi provides ways for its partners to use a common index yet distinguish themselves. There is no way to query the Inktomi index directly, as it is only made available through Inktomi's partners with whatever filters and ranking tweaks they may apply.

LookSmart
LookSmart is a human-compiled directory of web sites. In addition to being a stand-alone service, LookSmart provides directory results to MSN Search, Excite and many other partners. Inktomi provides LookSmart with search results when a search fails to find a match from among LookSmart's reviews. LookSmart launched independently in October 1996, was backed by Reader's Digest for about a year, and then company executives bought back control of the service.

Lycos
Lycos started out as a search engine, depending on listings that came from spidering the web. In April 1999, it shifted to a directory model similar to Yahoo. Its main listings come from the Open Directory project, and then secondary results come from the FAST Search engine. Some Direct Hit results are also used. In October 1998, Lycos acquired the competing HotBot search service, which continues to be run separately.

MSN Search
Microsoft's MSN Search service is a LookSmart-powered directory of web sites, with secondary results that come from Inktomi. RealNames and Direct Hit data is also made available. MSN Search also offers a unique way for Internet Explorer 5 users to save past searches.

NBCi
NBCi is a human-compiled directory of web sites, supplemented by search results from Inktomi. Like LookSmart, it aims to challenge Yahoo as the champion of categorizing the web. NBCi launched in late 1997 and is backed by NBC. It was formerly known as Snap but had a name change in late 2000.

Netscape Search
Netscape Search's results come primarily from the Open Directory and Netscape's own "Smart Browsing" database, which does an excellent job of listing "official" web sites. Secondary results come from Google. At the Netscape Netcenter portal site, other search engines are also featured.

Northern Light
Northern Light is another favorite search engine among researchers. It features a large index of the web, along with the ability to cluster documents by topic. Northern Light also has a set of "special collection" documents that are not readily accessible to search engine spiders. There are documents from thousands of sources, including newswires, magazines and databases. Searching these documents is free, but there is a charge of up to $4 to view them. There is no charge to view documents on the public web -- only for those within the special collection. Northern Light opened to general use in August 1997.

Open Directory
The Open Directory uses volunteer editors to catalog the web. Formerly known as NewHoo, it was launched in June 1998. It was acquired by Netscape in November 1998, and the company pledged that anyone would be able to use information from the directory through an open license arrangement. Netscape itself was the first licensee. Lycos and AOL Search also make heavy use of Open Directory data, while AltaVista and HotBot prominently feature Open Directory categories within their results pages.

Raging Search
Operated by AltaVista, Raging Search uses the same core index as AltaVista and virtually the same ranking algorithms. Why use it? AltaVista offers it for those who want fast search results, with no portal features getting in the way.

RealNames
The RealNames system is meant to be an easier-to-use alternative to the current web site addressing system. Those with RealNames-enabled browsers can enter a word like "Nike" to reach the Nike web site. To date, RealNames has had its biggest success through search engine partnerships. See the Using RealNames Links page for more information about RealNames.

WebCrawler
WebCrawler has the smallest index of any major search engine on the web -- think of it as Excite Lite. The small index means WebCrawler is not the place to go when seeking obscure or unusual material. However, some people may feel that by having indexed fewer pages, WebCrawler provides less overwhelming results in response to general searches. WebCrawler opened to the public on April 20, 1994. It was started as a research project at the University of Washington. America Online purchased it in March 1995 and was the online service's preferred search engine until Nov. 1996. That was when Excite, a WebCrawler competitor, acquired the service. Excite continues to run WebCrawler as an independent search engine.

Yahoo
Yahoo is the web's most popular search service and has a well-deserved reputation for helping people find information easily. The secret to Yahoo's success is human beings. It is the largest human-compiled guide to the web, employing about 150 editors in an effort to categorize the web. Yahoo has over 1 million sites listed. Yahoo also supplements its results with those from Google (beginning in July 2000, when Google takes over from Inktomi). If a search fails to find a match within Yahoo's own listings, then matches from Google are displayed. Google matches also appear after all Yahoo matches have first been shown. Yahoo is the oldest major web site directory, having launched in late 1994.

WebTop
WebTop is a crawler-based search engine that claims an extremely large index. In addition to listing web pages, WebTop also provides information from news sources, company information and WAP-related content in its search results. The company also offers the WebCheck tool (formerly called k-check), which is an Alexa-like search and discovery tool. WebTop is backed by Bright Station, the company that acquired some search technology and other resources from the former Dialog Corporation. The Dialog search service itself is now owned by a different company, the Thomson Corporation.

Five Easy Steps to Setting Up Shop Online

Michael J. Miller, Editor-In-Chief
PC Magazine

At first glance, it may seem impossibly complex to set up an online store. But the actual process isn’t quite so daunting. In preparation for PC Magazine’s recent evaluation of seven online commerce software packages, we asked ecommerce expert Mark Childers to lay it all out for us in a few easy steps. Here’s what he told us:

Step 1. Web Server: You host your Web storefront on a Web server. This consists of the software that will serve your application to site visitors and the hardware that will host your server and application. The average hardware should have 128 MB of RAM and anywhere from 150 MB to 1 GB of free hard disk space. Server software options vary depending on which storefront application you've used, but Microsoft Internet Information Server, Netscape Enterprise Server and the freeware Apache are all good solutions. You can either host it yourself, or find a hosting company that will host it for you, and may offer other services as well.

Step 2. Payment Server: In order to accept credit cards, you must open an Internet merchant account with a bank. You can't communicate directly with your bank, so you need to submit secure credit-card transactions to a transaction-processing service such as PaymentNet or CyberCash. These services will, in turn, send transactions to a payment-processing network like FirstData with your merchant account information for authorization. Once the product ships, the transaction is submitted for settlement and the payment-processing network charges the customer's credit card and submits payment to your bank account.

Step 3. Order Fulfillment: Depending on the type of products you’re selling, you'll fulfill orders either via download for electronic goods, or via physical shipment for hard goods. One of the benefits of downloadable products is that you can submit the credit card for authorization and settlement immediately. For shipped products, credit cards can be authorized but not submitted for settlement until the product ships.

If the products you’re selling can be downloaded over the Internet, you need a mechanism such as an FTP site. Your Web server likely includes FTP capabilities. For hard goods, you need to fulfill the order and ship it directly to the customer. You may want to tie your system into FedEx or UPS so that customers can get live shipping estimates when placing their orders and can use your site to check on the shipping status of their orders.

Step 4. Site Promotion: For your site to be successful, people need to visit it. Generating traffic can be a daunting task. You may want to get tools for search-engine submission and monitoring, such as WebPosition Gold. A banner exchange service such as Link Exchange is a low-cost way to generate site traffic and make your site look more professional. In exchange for displaying other companies' banners on your site via the exchange service, your banner will be displayed on other participating company sites.

Step 5. Site Monitoring and Analysis: Keeping track of who's coming to your site, how they're navigating it, and how they found it (via a banner ad or a search engine, for example) is key to determining how your site promotion efforts are faring. You'll need a log analysis tool, such as WebTrends, that will give you reports analyzing your traffic so that you can make any changes to the site or tweak your marketing efforts.

For much more about online stores and the software products that make them possible, be sure to see PC Magazine’s evaluation of Web storefront tools. Click for more.

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