Search Engine Experiments

planetextkfihrlsinmrte
withnumbertagskiclwpsi
withitalicsimbededtxif
withfonttagskrisodfjgl

This is just a little experiment to learn how search engines work. The strange words above are spelled with various kinds of HTML tags in order to see if they get indexed. The goal is to exclude certain words from the index without otherwise effecting the text on the page.

Results:

• yahoo.com indexed all 4 words
• google.com indexed all 4 words
• northernlight.com indexed all 4 words
• lycos.com indexed only the first 2 words, and treated the others as 2 words each
• AltaVista indexed only the first 2 words, and treated the others as 2 words each

So it looks like search engines are not as dumb as I had hoped.