Sullivan has established a page at Search Engine Watch that outlines proposals for search standards. Discussion revealed, however, that some unexpected barriers exist to implementing them. For instance, the Danish word for duck is and. Anyone searching a Danish site can t use AND as an operator, therefore. All participants agreed to continue the discussions informally, particularly to seek means to discourage spamming.
Cybernauts can only applaud efforts toward standardization and improvement of Web content quality.
This is good news for information professionals, who will find new roles as writers of categorization rules as well as more time to analyze and report on search results. More extensive reports of the Infonortics conference will appear soon in upcoming issues of Information Today and Searcher magazine, as well as on this NewsBreaks and Conference Reports site.