But this law firm, based in Frisco, Colorado, has initiated a court case that has caused panic to thousands of owners of web sites. The background to the lawsuit is that many people who are looking for information on the internet start by consulting a search engine a service, usually free, that offers a database of millions of web pages. By typing in a string of words, users can see a list of pages that contain some or all of those words. The trouble is that the mere presence of a set of words in the page text is not enough to guarantee that a page listed as a 'hit' by the search engine will be one that the user wants to see. This is partly because most users pick their search requests carelessly, but also because search engine technology is in its infancy.
Human nature being what it is, many site owners use keywords as a form of advertising.
Instead of simply offering a dry topic list in the keyword meta-tag, site owners often stuff the tag with strings of words of dubious relevance which will simply attract passing traffic. One extreme example is of pornographers who have used the word 'Mir' in their meta-tags because they know that millions of internet users have been searching for pages on the Russian space station. But there are also legitimate publishers who want to maximise the chances of their web site appearing in the first page of search engine hits, and who play around with meta-tags to do so. And so to the Oppedahl and Larson case. Two months ago, this Colorado law firm sued a handful of web site owners, who had inserted its name into their meta-tags.