What Good Is Metadata Anyway?
Some Web people and I discussed the purpose and utility of assigning metadata to the pages of a Web site that’s currently being developed. We’ve been looking at using the Dublin Core. The more I lobbied for the importance of its inclusion, the more their skepticism leaked into my head. A few years back, it seemed that metadata, especially the Dublin Core among American information professionals, was all the rage. I remember librarians talking about how search engines of the future were going to use it and how we’d better start putting it on our Web pages now. I even took a special course focusing on it. Now, I’m wondering what the current state of metadata really is because I don’t think I’ve heard much about it lately.
I remember that a few search engines use some metadata fields, like keywords and description. For search engines that rank pages based on the number of times it features search terms, having the extra text couldn’t hurt.
Maybe I’ll do some research to find out.
