[thelist] Search engines and good code

[Diane Soini]

The company I work for is looking at getting a better search engine for 
the corporate web site. It appears that they are leaning toward the 
Google appliance. That got me to wondering... A lot of folks on this 
list keep saying that using good markup improves the searchability of 
your web site and gives you better rankings as a result. I'm wondering 
if there is some empirical evidence out there to prove this. The 
company is also looking into a web site redesign, and the Internet 
Marketing Manager seems to think that the only thing that we'll have to 
worry about is making sure all pages have metatags and all non-HTML has 
metadata associated with it. He's a good page-layout artist, but his 
opinions about good coding are that it is completely worthless to even 
consider it. It would be nice to have a good counter-argument about 
that. I'm curious if you open the box on the Google appliance, do they 
actually tell you that using proper markup is going to help? Some how I 
doubt it since you get plenty of poorly-coded results in a google 
search. But I'm curious nonetheless. Anybody have evidence they could 
share to prove that good markup really improves the searchability?

D