Indexing: Organizing Data

• Plain Text only

  • Not graphics, even if they include text

  • Not Java or JavaScript

• Recognizing HTML Page Structure

  • Title (make sure they are descriptive)

  • Meta Descriptions often used as summary

  • Meta Keywords

  • Headers

  • Alt Tags

• Other Structures

• Metadata (Dublin Core et al.)

• Proprietory Tag Fields

• XML Tags

• Database Fields

• Beyond English

  • Multilingual sites need extra planning & testing

  • Index & Search must handle diacritical characters ("thé" is not the same as "the")

  • Non-Roman character sets are even more complex

• Stopwords

  • Removing common words (a, an, and, be, not, or, the, to, etc.)

  • Saves a lot of space in the index

  • Some searches become impossible ("to be or not to be")

  • Makes phrase searching trickier ("The Power And The Glory")

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Thunderlizard Web Usability 2000
Seattle, July 21

Avi Rappoport: Search Tools Consulting
www.searchtools.com