Victor Porton's Personal Weblog

All search engine companies, please take attention to correctly index math on the Web!

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Math on the Web is contained either in <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> tags (W3C Standard) or in <math> tags (old Microsoft Internet Explorer non-standard representation, what is yet used now.)

All search engine companies, please take care that:

• You should not check orthography in any <math> tags (as well as in <code> and possibly <pre> tags, BTW).
• You may index words inside <math> tags as well as normal HTML text, as anyway there are normally only one-letter words, numbers, and math operator names (which in my opinion should be indexed).
• You may add search option Only pages with math formulas (that is with <math> tags or <object> or XInclude tags refering to MathML objects) which is very useful for people searching for mathematical and other scientific information. This will also help adoption of new W3C Standards.

An example of a site with math formulas is www.mathematics21.org.

Tags: Search engines, Search engine companies, Google, Internet Search, Page rank, MathML, Math on the Web.