Web indexing
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Web indexing (or "Internet indexing") includes back-of-book-style indexes to individual websites or an intranet, and the creation of keyword metadata to provide a more useful vocabulary for Internet or onsite search engines. With the increase in the number of periodicals that have articles online, web indexing is also becoming important for periodical websites.
Back-of-the-book-style web indexes may be called "web site A-Z indexes." The implication with "A-Z" is that there is an alphabetical browse view or interface. This interface differs from that of a browse through layers of hierarchical categories (also known as a taxonomy) which are not necessarily alphabetical, but are also found on some web sites.
A web site A-Z index has several advantages over Search Engine (which do not cope well with synonyms, homonymes, inferences or passing mentions and are unforgiving of typing errors) but require more work to install on a website - each reference is checked by a human indexer to ensure its relevance, providing a better service to the web site user.
Although an A-Z index could be used to index multiple sites, rather than the multiple pages of a single site, this is unusual.
Metadata web indexing involves assigning keywords or phrases to web pages or web sites within a meta-tag field, so that the web page or web site can be retrieved with a search engine that is customized to search the keywords field. This may or may not involve using keywords restricted to a controlled vocabulary list.
