To increase the chances that search engines will take notice of their creations, website designers often bury in the hidden codes of their sites the names of popular or famous companies. The following notes describe this practice:
Most web-based resources are created using the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). Despite popular myth, this is not actually a programming language, but merely a markup language which uses ASCII (plain text) 'tags' to tell a web browser how to make the pretty pictures. Unlike traditional programs which turn into binary mush when used, or text documents (FTP://...) where the end user can see everything, HTML tags are never seen by the end user but remain in text form for the computer programs which read them.
The catch is that not all of the unseen data on a page is necessarily functional. Metatags and other tricks -- in addition to providing certain functional information directly to the browser -- can allow a sort of 'comments' space, where web authors can place information which they want the search engines to 'see' and to use in their searches, but which they might not necessarily want the end-user to see (wouldn't want to mess up the aesthetics of a page, now would we?). Uses might include adding keywords to assist search engines in leading potential customers to a web site, or adding deceptive keywords for any number of nefarious purposes.
Should such activities be permitted?