Google Code: Web Authoring Statistics

Published: 2006-01-30 10:30:30

Google has analyzed over a billion documents to extract information about popular class names, elements, and metadata. The findings offer insights into standard naming conventions and Google's interpretation of HTML data. A notable revelation is the widespread but ineffective use of the <meta name='revisit-after'> tag, which appears more frequently than the <em> element, despite lacking support from major search engines.

Google Code: Web Authoring Statistics

Our friends at Google have been busy analyzing slightly over a billion documents, extracting information about popular class names, elements, attributes, and related metadata. The results are really interesting, not only as they provide a detailed insight into standard class names or id names, but also as the Google authors review the results and reveal some interesting insights into how Google interpretes the html data.

and revisit-after, supposedly used to tell search engines how often to recrawl the page. To our knowledge only one search engine has ever supported it, and that search engine was never widely used — at this point, it is nothing more than a good luck charm. A remarkably widely used one. More pages use the completely worthless than use the element!

Google Code: Web Authoring Statistics