Re: Description or Abstract?

Martijn Koster (m.koster@webcrawler.com)
Thu, 4 Jul 1996 12:21:09 -0700


At 5:11 PM 7/3/96, G. Edward Johnson wrote:
>I have seen a post here advocating the use of <META HTTP-EQUIV=abstract
>CONTENT="..."> and have set up my pages to use it.

You have? I don't rmember that...

> Recently, while
>looking at altavista and infoseek I notice they used <META
>HTTP-EQUIV=description ...>. In fact, infoseek says that if description
>is used, they will display that in the results page.

I believe the concensus is to use <META NAME="description" CONTENT="..."">
but I'm not objective :-)

>My question then is which should I use? Do all search engines that pay
>attention to stuff like this use description, or do some use abstract, or
>both?

Not heard anyone using "Abstract", a few use "description" and "keywords",
some think it leads to too much spamming and drop it altogether.

Reinier wrote:

> However, if this was a conscious decision on their part,
>it is rather interesting: it allows you to get your images,
>sound bites, etc., indexed by sending them out with Description: headers.

By using <IMG> and stuff you mean? I would expect them to escape that
or drop it...

-- Martijn

Email: m.koster@webcrawler.com
WWW: http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/mak.html