Pynchon and Rancho Santa Fe

[Jay Carlson]

>> Question for website professionals (if they're any left): do the
>> sites themselves provide the key words, or do the search engines?

> The web page authors provide this.

Not quite right.  A web page can *suggest* keywords that it wants to
be indexed under, but the search robot is under no obligation to obey
this.  In the minimal case where the page author suggested no
keywords, the engine tries to look at headers, links, apparent section
heads etc to get some context.

Amusingly, search engines are "blind" in that they can't read GIF
files as text.  Sites that aren't thinking about this won't get
indexed the way they want if all their section heads are pictures....
-- 
Jay Carlson    nop at nop.com    nop at kagoona.mitre.org

Flat text is just *never* what you want.   ---stephen p spackman