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> I think Google is right here. If you mark something as a sequence, it is reasonable to presume that the start of the sequence is the normal entry point, in this case the front page of your blog.

I disagree. Just because the rel="prev"/rel="next" commands provide the ability to browse forward and backward through a series of documents doesn't mean that the only possible entry point is the beginning of the series. It doesn't mean that there even is a single well-defined first entry in the series. There's nothing to stop a series of links connecting into a closed loop, or to stop a single page from having multiple rel="prev" links because it appears in multiple series, or multiple rel="next" links because a previously linear series bifurcates and the user has multiple choices.

>> Generally ordered sequences are designed to be read from the start

The spec makes no such claims, it just talks about sequences of documents in a very generic way. If the spec is not clear on this, it should be changed first.

And in a search context, I definitely don't agree with your interpretation of "sequence". The fact that my hit is part of a sequence is secondary to the fact that I just want to see a hit on my search query.

Mind you that I don't necessarily disagree with your nuances on the various use cases, but the current spec is clearly written to be very generic and should be interpreted as such.

If I'm looking for one paragraph in the middle of a long sequence of pages I want to be taken to the page that paragraph is on, not the first page.

A web-log is, for a lot of people, a historical (chronological) record. For these cases rel=next/prev makes sense to semantically create a relationship between individual post.

> I think Google is right here. If you mark something as a sequence, it is reasonable to presume that the start of the sequence is the normal entry point, in this case the front page of your blog.

Imagine applying your rule to Google Book Search. Google found the word "fizbit" on page 2031 of a book. I click on the link and Google takes me to the FIRST PAGE of the book. So I get to hunt through the book page by page until I find that word.

The same thing applies to web pages of all kinds. Here's my maxim: if Google has a result for your query to some term, then clicking on that result better take you to a page with the term on it. Otherwise Google's result was a waste of your time.

> I think Google is right here. If you mark something as a sequence, it is reasonable to presume that the start of the sequence is the normal entry point, in this case the front page of your blog.

For me, if I click on a URL I want to go to that URL. I don't want the search engine or the browser deciding that I'm better off going to some other URL. Google should provide the information, let me be the driver. If this gets too annoying I'll just switch to ddg.gg.

I agree that the author is misusing prev/next if he plans to put them on ever article in his blog. Using prefetch for similar articles makes sense though.

> For me, if I click on a URL I want to go to that URL.

I don't think that was ever up for debate. This is about which pages appear on search results, so you might see the url of the first page of an article instead of the last page.

This all seems overblown. If you add metadata, expect it to be used!

This is not my interpretation of the Google blog post[1]. If your search result is on page 3 they'll send you to page 1. This is undesirable to me. Please call me out if this is an incorrect interpretation.

[1]http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/paginatio...

They say they may. It may also depend how similar the content on the pages is, and how specific your search term is. Eg if there are 10 pages on a disease, one is about symptoms, and your search term is about symptoms you probably want that page, if it is a general search you probably want the start.

Thats my interpretation of them, how it works in actual use we shall see.

Sorry, the difficulty seems to be what "search result" means. If you search for "foo", and that term happens to be on page 3, then Google may produce page 1 as the search result. Just like at the moment, sometimes the term you search for only appears on the pages which link to the search result, not on the search result itself.

Sometimes the term does not appear at all, for example if I search for "batman begins sequel" the first result is: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0468569/ That page does not have the term "sequel" on it, but it is still the first search result. And if you view the cached version, the only word highlighted is "batman".

Very specifically, my post above addresses the comment that Google might display one url, then take you to another. That seems unlikely. Instead, you will only see the url of the page that is the search result, which may be page 1.

I agree with your reasoning completely, but I also enjoy going from one distinct article to the next with a fast-forward command or gesture. Is there a way to enable that style of browsing using something other than rel-next?

Opera has been guessing which link to use as "next" for a long time, the feature is called "fast forward".

...and I use rel-next to enable fast forward. I could be ignorant of other methods though.

Fast forward works in google search results, which doesn't use rel="next". I suspect that Opera does it heuristically, so if it sees a link with the text "next" it will use that.

If rel=next is missing, Opera guesses based on link label. There used to be a fast_forward.ini file with list of all recognized names ("Next page", "Proceed", "Forward", etc.).