Online library catalogs and periodical indexes now have a wide variety of title search capabilities. Titles can be browsed in an alphabetical list. Keyword searches for single words within a title are available along with exact title and title phrase searches. And bibliographic databases can even have multiple title fields for main title, subtitle, series title, alternate title, uniform title, and more. On Web pages, there is only one title, designated by the HTML title element.
Title searching on the Web goes back to the earliest days of the Web search engines.
As the early HTML documents began using the title element, it became an important element for early search engine ranking algorithms. AltaVista even made it searchable. Since that time, Web page title search capabilities have expanded somewhat, although to nowhere near the levels available in our more sophisticated bibliographic systems. An ideal system would recognize when a title phrase match works better than a title word match. Title searching is not as straightforward as simply typing in the title and getting the exact match.