Does
the Internet have Structure?
| The link above
is to my work web page at Carnegie Mellon.
You can actually view the structure that exists within any web
page. Use the “VIEW” pull-down menu on
your browser and then choose “Source.”
The first code recognized by a computer would be the “<HTML>”
tag that you’ll see about five lines down (after a bunch of remarks that the
computer ignores). This would be
equivalent to a document type – if you’ve ever done an advanced Google or
Yahoo search, you’ll notice that you can restrict your search to a type of
document. Right after the
“<HTML>” tag you’ll see the beginning of the “<HEAD>” of the
document. The chief portion of the
head of an html document is the “<TITLE>.” Note that I put a bunch of different
variants of my name in the title of my page.
I did that so that if someone looks for me as “Matt Marsteller” or
“Matthew Marsteller” or “Matthew R. Marsteller,” then when this page is
indexed by most search engines, there’s a good chance that most search
engines give greater weight to the title of a web page. The title of a web page is what shows up in
the blue bar at the top of your browser window. The web page also has “Web Page of Matthew
R. Marsteller” in big bold letters. If
you look in the source code (about a third of the way through the code),
you’ll see that this phrase is enclosed in “<H1>” and </H1>”
tags. This is a heading within a
document and can also be given more prominence by a search engine. The key operative phrase is “can be given
more prominence” – nothing is guaranteed.
When search engines rank their search results, a lot of things come
into play. Ranking algorithms (rules
the computer will follow) are often redesigned. We’ll explore searching of the Internet at
the end of our study together. For
now, I hope that you’ll appreciate that the typical web page on the Internet
can, and usually does, have structure that search engines can make use
of. Perhaps it’s a bit more crude than
we’re used to … but it’s there! There
are other concerns such as … is it standard HTML code? The answer is, unfortunately, no. One thing that is popular for people to do
is to use a word processor like Microsoft Word to produce their HTML code
(using the “SAVE As” function). It’s
easy to do, but the result is NOT standard HTML. Most browsers will interpret it correctly
(kind of) – hopefully most search engines will as well, eh? |