Internet Search Engines' Response to Metadata Dublin Core Implementation

The research described here examined performance of major search engines with regard to two groups of web pages: those with metadata and those without metadata. Introduction of metadata Dublin Core, especially the Subject element, should improve retrievability of a web page and, subsequently, its visibility. The visibility of a web page in a search engine results list is defined and used in this study to measure retrievability performance of major search engines. Results show there are significant differences among these two groups in most search engines. The reasons for the differences are analyzed.