Sets of top-ranking pages in 19 languages returned by the Google search engine were downloaded and their titles and meta tagged keywords analyzed. Results showed significant differences in proportion of pages with keywords depending on language; specifically, pages in Dutch, French, and German showed the highest proportions with keywords, while pages in Chinese and Korean showed the lowest proportions. Keywords were mostly in the languages of the pages, though on Chinese, Greek, Indonesian, and Turkish pages keywords in English or in English mixed with other languages predominated. The proportion of very long titles also varied significantly with language, with nearly 10% of titles on Russian pages exceeding 100 bytes, in contrast to less than 1% on Chinese, Finnish, Indonesian, and Polish pages. Both standard ASCII extensions and character entity references were used to code special characters in titles.
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