September 18, 2003: Meta tags, originally introduced to the search space by AltaVista as way to get better descriptions of a Web page, were terribly abused by search engine spammers. Only the meta keywords and meta description tags were indexed, and only by some search engines. Now, Gigablast is introducing new meta tags and is daring to try again. This time, they are "geotags," meta tags for identifying the location of a Web site. According to the information page, the following meta tags are now indexed and supported at Gigablast:

• zipcode
• city
• state
• country
• author
• language
• classification

Before this will become very useful, Web sites will need to start using the meta tags. Note that this does not use the Dublin Core meta tags. The same post also announces a faster refresh cycle and a doubling of the Gigablast database: "I am planning a significantly faster update cycle, not to mention growing the index to about 400 million pages, all hopefully in the next few months."

Subject(s): Gigablast