Notes on the meta tags as they relate to the NIPMN search engine

Definitions:

Meta tag notes for "state" tag

The state tag supports all 50 US states by state abbreviation. The tag is extensible to support Canadian provinces and other countries.

This tag will be used by the engine for searches of the type "Show me all hits for Tarnished Plant Bug in North Carolina." It also associates the information with a certain USDA region. Therefore, a query for Tarnished Plant Bug in the Southern Region would search within all the states in the southern region.

If this tag is omitted, the page will not be included in searches by state.

Where each site is registered with the search engine, it may be possible to include an option that says, "all the information at this site is for this particular state." If that is done, the agent would know to assign all pages to the state without use of the state tag. This can save you a lot of work!

The state tag within a document will always overrule the state option in the search engine registry.

Meta tag notes for "nipmnsubject" tag

The nipmnsubject tag is what allows the search engine agent to assign a page to a category within the Yahoo-like directory of IPM information.

If this tag is omitted, the page will not be included in the directory (though it will still be in the search engine's database).

However, it makes sense to have another way to get a page into the directory, and that would be by entering it the same way Yahoo has you do it: go to the category in the directory first, notice that your page is not there, and click the "add" button to add your page to that directory.

Meta tag notes for "keywords" tag

The keywords tag will be used for the "Quicksearch" function of the search engine. Since it will only search through meta-information, it will be much faster than searching through entire page information.

The keywords tag is also used when weighting a document to determine how good a match it is to the query. For example, a document that contains "Tarnished Plant Bug" in both the keywords meta tag and the text of the document will be weighted more highly than an equivalent document without the meta tag.

If this tag is omitted, the page will not turn up in meta-information searches.

Meta tag notes for "description" tag

The contents of the "description" tag are used to return a summary of the document to the user along with the document title as part of a hit listing.

If this tag is omitted, the first few lines of the document are used as the summary.

Meta tag notes for "author" tag

The contents of the "author" tag are used as part of a meta search and anytime a search is made for a particular person.

If this tag is omitted, meta-information searches for author will not find the document. If the name of the author appears in the document itself, it will only be found using a full search (not a meta-information search).

Meta tag notes for "pest" tag

The "pest" tag is used for meta searches for the pest.

This is fairly important, as many people will search for things like "European Corn Borers in Iowa" using the drop menus.

Meta tag notes for "pestclass" tag

We are currently going with the following pest classes:

Meta tag notes for "expires" tag

After this date, the search engine will no longer update the document. This tag is not of too much use since the old version would still be in the database. We could set it so that it is deleted from the database after the expiry date, but "old information is better than no information." The format should be 1-Jan-1998 01:00:00.

Meta tag notes for "robots" tag

This an internet standard to prevent robots from indexing a page or trying to follow links on that page. This can be useful if you know that you don't want a document indexed.

Meta tag notes for "nipmn" tag

This allows options to be specified for use by the NIPMN agent that extracts information from your site. The only currently supported value is "noindex", which tells the search agent that the page is not appropriate for NIPMN and should not be indexed.

Please direct comments to John VanDyk.

Last updated 01-14-98.