Google-The Search Engine Of Preference

When Google became the search engine of preference, it ushered in a new era of how search engine listings are displayed. Google chose not to use the Meta description tag and instead relied on the content contained within a website.

The biggest impact from this decision resulted in the Meta description having no significance whatsoever on where a website is positioned within Google's results. A website owner could optimize their description tag to the highest degree, and it would have little effect on how their website was positioned in Google.

The other effect of choosing to ignore the description tag was that Google did not use this information as part of the website's listing; instead formulating it's own description using content extracted from the web page itself (only if there is very little page content will you see Google display the meta description).

When it became apparent that Google's approach was successful, other search engines started following suit to the point that few search engines today spider and display the Meta description tag.

So with so many search engines choosing to ignore the description tag, why bother to optimize it? The answer is simple. It takes just a couple of minutes to optimize the Meta tags on the web page you are building. While you may not influence the likes of Google, Yahoo, or AOL, there are plenty of smaller search engines that still spider the Meta description tag.

The largest of these is Inktomi, which was recently acquired by Yahoo. Although, Yahoo has not yet switched its search results to the Inktomi database, there are still many search engines that rely on Inktomi results. The biggest Inktomi audience comes from MSN's web page results. The web page results at MSN come after featured sites, sponsored sites and web directory results but nonetheless they are there. While you are unlikely to have your Inktomi listing displayed on MSN for generic terms such as "computers" or "Dell" you should see traffic from MSN for longer, more specific terms such as "refurbished Dell computers". The more specific the term, the more likely that MSN will rely on the spidering technology of Inktomi to provide the search results.

And with OneStat.com reporting in April 2003 that 45% of all searches are for phrases with three words or more, you can see that there is still a large audience to reach by optimizing your Meta description tag and targeting crawlers such as Inktomi.