Online, the page references become URLs, and HTML documents exist in a very flat environment. That is, there is no sense that one URL comes first, but rather they all reside in the same or in different directories. In the global Internet environment, meaning also becomes harder to manage. The major flaw of search engines, for example, is the inability to filter out less meaningful text. Whereas a search engine considers every hit equally, an indexer must judge the importance of a concept before including it in the index.
Indexing is as much art and science as is writing.
Seth finds himself traveling and conducting indexing workshops more and more frequently, communicating his new vision to his venerable trade's unsung practitioners. In response to numerous requests from colleagues, he wrote and published several guides and tutorials, which you can find on his Web site . Those documents have taken on a life of their own within the industry, he says. Learning the Trade Seth stumbled into indexing by accident, having earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in optical engineering from the University of Rochester in New York. Hired straight out of college, he went to work for a company that marketed optical, scientific, and educational equipment.