What Is Metadata?
Do you know that thing you're looking at right now? The one with the words and pictures and stuff? Yeah, that. It's called a "web page. " A web page is a document you can view in a browser. When you search through Google, you search the metadata of your search results. In other words, you're searching for information on the data on the page, title, description, keywords, and so on. Metadata is just data about data. It describes what's on that page so that search engines can understand it better and show it to people interested in looking at it! However, metadata can be applied to documents of any type and is not limited to the Web. In its most basic form, metadata is information about information. Although it's often described as data about data, it's information about information. Remembering this is important because metadata is often as important as the information itself. Metadata comes in many forms, but most fall into two categories: structured and unstructured. Structured metadata is data that has been standardized. For example, a book's title, author, and publication date are all structured metadata fields. Unstructured metadata falls into a variety of categories. Its free-form information is often as important as structured metadata, such as comments, tags, and descriptions. Metadata is the magic that allows search engines to understand your content. Without metadata, search engines would have no idea you are a dog-loving bibliophile who enjoys eating pizza at midnight and binge-watching Netflix. When users search for "pizza," they don't get back thousands of results about the delicious Italian food. They get back results relevant to their search terms, such as Pizza Hut's menu or recipes for making pizza at home. Without metadata, there is no way for Google to know that your web page is about pizza, so it will not appear when someone searches for "pizza."
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