Sorensen distinguished between the working of a local and an external search engine. Locally, indexing is done according to file location in a directory, rather than by file links, therefore it would not be affected by broken links as is possible with an external search. It does not harvest dynamic data such as CGI results. Sorensen said that designing pages with a generic title would result in a higher retrieval ranking. Also meta descriptors and keywords should be created using terms that searchers would be likely to use.
Repetition is also useful, e.g., include both art libraries and art librarians.
He briefly discussed cases when web sites do not need a search engine. Site has many users or users of varied backgrounds Site has an expanding number of pages Sorensen also provided many questions to consider in choosing a search engine. Metadata was defines as data about data, or the story that tells the story. Dublin Core metadata is one application of metadata. It uses 15 basic elements.