Meta Tag Indexing at Gigablast

Gigablast makes another bold move -- indexing, searching, and displaying of all generic meta tags. Previously, some search engines would index words in a meta keyword or meta description tag. Some would use the meta description tag for the summary in the search engine results list. But none of the major search engines ever indexed any other meta tags. Now, Gigablast claims to be indexing all "generic" meta tags.

In addition, Gigablast can display the meta tags in the results list. Doing this requires adding commands to the URL of the results list. At the end of the url, add a &dt= followed by the word(s) for the meta tags, followed by a colon, and then a number to represent how many characters from each meta tag should be displayed.

So, for example, adding &dt=keywords+author+generator+description:30, will display the meta tag content for meta keywords, meta author, meta generator, and meta description tags for any records retrieved. Use a + between meta tag words.

It seems that this "generic" meta tag approach excludes more complex meta tags like Dublin Core which use a syntax like DC.Creator. The dot syntax will not work for the display command, although Gigablast does index some of the content of these tags.

This are great new features, but the display is difficult to get. I hope that the advanced search page soon includes options for displaying various meta tags and that a field search for meta tags will be added as well. Let's hope that unscrupulous Web sites do not abuse these meta tag abilities.