Review of Metadata Elements within the Web Pages Resulting from Searching in General Search Engines

The present investigation was aimed to study the scope of presence of Dublin Core metadata elements and HTML meta tags in web pages. Ninety web pages were chosen by searching general search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN). The scope of metadata elements (Dublin Core and HTML Meta tags) present in these pages as well as existence of a significant correlation between presence of meta elements and type of search engines were investigated. Findings indicated very low presence of both Dublin Core metadata elements and HTML meta tags in the pages retrieved which in turn illustrates the very low usage of meta data elements in web pages. Furthermore, findings indicated that there are no significant correlation between the type of search engine used and presence of metadata elements. From the standpoint of including metadata in retrieval of web sources, search engines do not significantly differ from one another.