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devsdayesterday at 6:54 PM2 repliesview on HN

Webpages used to have meta keyword tags until spammers hijacked them for irrelevant keywords.

I think browsers can play a part in building a local search index for URLs based on those keywords the page declares and cross verify/accept only those that are in prominently visible content, or may be delegate to an external engine(like LLMs) via an extension etc. This is particularly useful for cases where full text indexing is not feasible or desirable.

I doubt Google will ever add such feature in chrome though.


Replies

z3t4today at 9:40 AM

Did irrelevant keywords ever work for the spammer? You could add "naked" as a keyword because it had a lot of searches compared to "compiler". Now what happened to those looking for naked cats when they got to your website about code compilation. It's not like they would stop and think "oohh I'll look at this instead"

marginalia_nuyesterday at 7:13 PM

Meta keyword tags have always sucked even without malice. Because they're invisible, authors frequently forget to update them, copying <head> boilerplate between documents.

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