Timm Murray wrote:
At 09:38 AM 6/3/04 +1000, Mathew Robertson wrote:
This is a common mistake that information creators think 'is a good
thing'... The web got popular for a number of reasons - one of them
being "full text indexing of all content" (including
headers/footers/etc).
Why? There is no useful information in headers/footers. By nature of
using a templating system, they are the same on every page in a given
section. Including them in search results only increases the noise and
the amount of information that needs to be indexed.
I've seen sites where I could read a word on a page, input it into the
'site search' box, and get no results. This tells me that the word does
not exist on the site (even though I can see it) or more likely that
this is not really a 'site search' but perhaps a 'content search' or
'article search' or whatever...
I think people are used to using Google, Yahoo, etc. and getting results
that come from *every* piece of text on the page, whether that is a good
thing or bad thing can depend... it can depend on user expectations, and
other things.
While you say that there is no useful information in headers/footers,
that may be by your definition and decision of what goes in a header and
footer. This can vary from person to person.
Pete
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