HTML Titles Are Used by Search Engines

Search engines use HTML titles when presenting ORGANIZED SEARCH RESULTS (J3). Figure D9.3 shows the results of MSNBC's site search. The first hit looks like an automatically generated title, which is not very useful when customers are trying to understand the search results. Look at the fourth search hit. It uses the HTML title to display the name of the page. Figure D9.4 shows what the same search result looks like in an Internet-wide search engine.

Figure D9.3. This result comes from an MSNBC search on the term Harry Potter.

(www.msnbc.com, July 23, 2001)