Keyword (Internet search)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- For other meanings of the word see keyword.
A keyword in an Internet search is one of the words used to find matching web pages. It was popularized during the early days of search engine development, as it was not possible to ask natural language questions and find the desired sites. Searches gave the best results if only a few keywords were chosen and searched for. These "keywords" captured the essence of the topic in question and were likely to be present on all sites listed by the search engine.
Keywords are still used today. Many modern search engines have methods for determining which words in a search string are important and are ought to be treated as keywords. Common words like articles (a, an, the) and conjunctions (and, or, but) are not treated as keywords because it is inefficient to do so. Almost every English-language site on the Internet has the article "the", and so it makes no sense to search for it.
[edit] See also
- Stop words - explanation of stopwords
- Indexing - how search engines work and store keywords
- Information retrieval
[edit] External links
- Free keyword suggestion tool - Get 100 results free, adult filtered with drill down into the long tail.
- TopicCrunch - the deep searcher - A tool for deep searching in Search Engines.
- Keyword Research Tool - Find the most popular keywords.
- List of keyword research tools
- Wordtracker
- Keyword Elite
- Keyword Elite Review
- Search Keyword
- Keyword Analyzer - A tool in expanding and analyzing keyword list.
