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Why can't Google (and others) distinguish between what's viewable on

the page and what's not viewable on the page?

         

HughMungus

7:38 pm on Oct 17, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



For example, I'm doing a google search for: +asp +"content-type" +text

What I wanted was web pages that talk about these things, not web pages that include these words outside of the body (e.g., stuff like META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset)

Why can't google's results include only what's viewable to page visitors instead of what's viewable to a bot (e.g., don't include content that's in the head, not in the body, or otherwise not viewable "on the page")?

Maybe it's just me.

Brett_Tabke

7:41 pm on Oct 17, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



lol. It would take processing a page by a browser. And as far as I know, there is no browser code......

Wait - Yes there is. Mozillia.

You don't suppose that it was looked at and discarded as to processor intensive do you?

Yes, yes, I do. ;-)

/what the 'el, it's friday right!?

HughMungus

7:44 pm on Oct 17, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Ah. I guess processing power would be the reason. Maybe in the future.

BigDave

7:56 pm on Oct 17, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Actually, to limit it to what is between the <body> and </body> tags would not be all that processor intensive.

The problem is that the <Body> tag doesn't really mean anything, and stuff outside that block element can be seen. So then they would be using a stricter interpretation of the HTML spec than any of the browsers.

dirkz

6:24 pm on Oct 18, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Maybe I've gotten you wrong, but I think it's rather unlikely that Google would return a page as relevant because your search matched a word in some meta tags. I think these times are gone :)

If I mimick your search, I get pages with these words in the BODY. Google is rather famous for ignoring meta stuff.

Kirby

6:46 pm on Oct 18, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



This is where the value of human editors comes in to play and supposedly why a dmoz listing would be worth a bit more than a typical link.

dmorison

11:28 pm on Oct 18, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



HughMungus,

To take your exact example...

[google.com...]

...does return pages that talk about those items; not pages that contain that text outside of the "viewable" area....