A-E       F-L       M-Q       R-Z

Meme - An idea that catches on.

Meta Search - A process of searching several databases simultaneously and combining the results.

Meta Search - A process of searching several databases simultaneously and combining the results.

MetaSearch Engine - A search engine that searches multiple other search engines and combines the results. Currently the top Meta Search Engine is Go2net.com.

Meta Tag - Author generated HTML commands that are placed in the head section of an HTML document. Current popular meta tags that can affect search engine rankings, are Meta Keywords, and Meta Description.

Meta KEYWORDS tag is used to group a series of words that relate to a website. These tags can be used by search engines to classify pages for searches. The Meta DESCRIPTION is used to describe the document. The meta description is then displayed in search engine results.

The Robots Meta Tag is used to control certain aspect of how a search engine indexes the page. An HTTP-EQUIV meta tag can sometimes be used to issue some server HTTP commands. Most common is a HTTP REFRESH command. Gaining in popularity is a NOCACHE command to thwart server caching of a page.

Other useful tags are the CHAR SET tag to describe the document language and character set. The Author meta tag and the Generator meta tag (software used to generate the page).

Metacrawler - A large meta search engine now called Go2net.com.

Metafind - Another meta search engine.

Mining Company - Former name of About.com.

MirrorSite - A shadow duplicate copy of a web site at a separate url. This allows websites to spread out the resource load on a server. Mirror sites are difficult to get indexed properly by search engine. Search engines view the multiple duplicate pages as spamming.

Misspellings - Intentionally making a spelling mistake in meta keywords or meta tags to catch search engine users who also misspell words when searching.

Multi Titles - Another old defunct trick where authors would double up the titles in a page to increase search engine relevancy.

Multiple Keyword Tags - Using two or three keyword META tags to increase the relevancy of a page. This technique is considered spam by most search engines and should be avoided.

Netfind - Online America's search engine.

NorthernLight- A large search engine. Some services on this search engine are pay-for-play. At one point, Northern Light was one of the highest volume SE's, but its fortunes have faded away. Northern Light is the only search engine to ban other meta search engines from searching its database.

Obfuscation - The act of misrepresenting meta tags or content. The user is presented with a page that looks normal, but it is not the page submitted to search engines. This is similar to cloaking or stealth pages, but it further protects the code by giving code stealers a micky page. The page often looks normal, but there will be something wrong with it to cause it to rank low on search engines (things like bad keyword density or meta tag errors). When someone steals a high ranking page like this and installs it on their own server, they will never get the rankings the real page gets.

Off Page Criteria - When a search engine ranks pages by using data that is not present on the web page itself. This could be the presence of a directory listing, or the number and quality of inbound links to a page.

Open Directory Project - The Open Directory Project (ODP) is a site directory run by volunteer editors. This is one of the great internet success stories of 1999. The ODP is used by Lycos, Hotbot, AOL-Netfind, Netscape Netcenter, and the home base www.dmoz.org itself. Currently there are around 700,000 hand picked and selected sites in the directory. The first edition of the ODP was known as NewHoo (a play on Yahoo). Netscape provided server space for the NewHoo directory and it was collectively renamed The ODP. See http://dmoz.org History

Open Source - Open source software is software that is released with source code. People are allowed to make derivatives works from open source software as long as it is released under the same open source agreement.

Open Text - A formerly large directory of businesses directory that is all but defunct now. Located at: http://www.opentext.com.

Opt-In - A program that gives the user choice of participation.

Opt-Out - Any program or process that requires a user to take action to stop being included in some action. eg: opt out email lists.

Outbound Link - A link that points away from your website

Packet Sniffing - An analysis method that monitors network packets (pieces of data) in real time as they make their way to the Web server.