Does topic metadata help with Web search?

It has been claimed that topic metadata can be used to improve the accuracy of text searches. Here, we test this claim by examining the contribution of metadata to effective searching within websites published by a university with a strong commitment to and substantial investment in metadata. We use four sets of queries, a total of 463, extracted from the university’s official query logs and from the university’s site map. The results are clear: the available metadata is of little value in ranking answers to those queries. A follow-up experiment with the websites published in a particular government jurisdiction queries confirms that this conclusion is not specific to the particular university. Examination of the metadata present at the university reveals that, in addition to implementation deficiencies, there are inherent problems in trying to use subject and description metadata to enhance the searchability of websites. Our experiments show that link anchor text, which can be...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: JASIS
• Authors: David Hawking, Justin Zobel
• Keywords: Description Metadata, JASIS 2007, Metadata, Topic Metadata