Comment by devsda
16 hours ago
Webpages used to have meta keyword tags until spammers hijacked them for irrelevant keywords.
I think browsers can play a part in building a local search index for URLs based on those keywords the page declares and cross verify/accept only those that are in prominently visible content, or may be delegate to an external engine(like LLMs) via an extension etc. This is particularly useful for cases where full text indexing is not feasible or desirable.
I doubt Google will ever add such feature in chrome though.
Did irrelevant keywords ever work for the spammer? You could add "naked" as a keyword because it had a lot of searches compared to "compiler". Now what happened to those looking for naked cats when they got to your website about code compilation. It's not like they would stop and think "oohh I'll look at this instead"
Meta keyword tags have always sucked even without malice. Because they're invisible, authors frequently forget to update them, copying <head> boilerplate between documents.
"I can't practice minimum quality control as a web dev" doesn't sound like a problem with the standard.
When designing a standard like this you need to apply systems thinking.
The poor data quality is a problem for anyone who wants to use the tags, which has seen everyone almost universally reaching for other solutions. Search engines have preferred anchor tags, bookmarking solutions have applied user tagging.
With keyword tags it's been a vicious circle of poor data quality and neglect since day one. Even in documents from the early 1990s when people were really trying, the data quality is inconsistent at best.