SES Chicago - December 7-11, 2009

May 17, 2007

Yahoo Researcher Declares Semantic Web Dead

Mor Naaman, a research scientist with Yahoo Research Berkeley, stood in front of a roomful of semantic Web researchers and declared that the semantic Web is dead. This happened last week at the International World Wide Web Conference in Alberta, Canada, as Naaman describes on the Yahoo Research Berkeley blog.

While Naaman, a semantic Web researcher himself, was admittedly using some hyperbole in his statement, he maintains that "the grand vision of 'A Semantic Web' will not be achieved," mostly because users cannot be expected to annotate media with complex labels, as a researcher would, but can only be expected to use simple tags. In addition, developers should be expected to pass over complicated standards in favor of simpler ones, like RSS, microformats, and Flickr machine tags.

"There is simply no hope in enforcing a complete set of semantics for media (or content) annotation on the web as a whole. Which led me to declare the [grand vision of the] semantic web dead," Naaman said.

Things like tags and microformats are ways to add what Naaman calls "lightweight semantics" to a piece of media, which researchers can then attempt to make sense of with more complex tools and techniques, such as schema mapping, pattern extraction, or semantic analysis. Naaman refers to this structure as the "Emerging-Semantics Web."

He's included his presentation, along with links to the presentations of the other researchers on his panel, at the Yahoo Research Berkeley blog.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 1:55 AM | Permalink

January 15, 2007

PR Newswire links press releases to Technorati

In a press release issued today, PR Newswire and Technorati announced that readers of PR Newswire's press releases can track reactions from bloggers directly from announcements via press releases. Press releases distributed through PR Newswire will now include a Technorati button linking readers to a search result page hosted by Technorati that will display a list of blogs discussing and linking to the news release, as well as relevant excerpts from those blogs. Once on the search result page, the reader can set up an automatic watch list on Technorati to notify them when any new blog posts are published.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 6:56 PM | Permalink

December 19, 2006

Malicious Tagging and the Slippery Slope

Malicious tagging is defined as "injecting keywords or for self-promotion in general." We wonder where the slippery slope begins on this one.

See this announcement for papers at upcoming AIR conference.

The fight continues against adversarial information retrieval (AIR), which is more commonly known as spamdexing. All to be applauded, but what about malicious tagging in general? Yes, you get irrelevant garbage. You know it when you see it, right? Thinking about what constitutes malicious tagging is worth time and effort.

What about making sure we don't create "type II errors" where tagging is incorrectly treated as malicious? What if you are...selling 10,000 different items that are all the same thing? Advertising geographically-based businesses? Researching a topic and sharing it with colleagues? Enjoying a special but very common hobby?

It seems like tagging makes sense and might seem malicious as you spread the joy. We'd like to know where and when this transforms from a good thing exactly.

Posted by at 1:37 PM | Permalink

November 2, 2006

GPS, Geotagging, Images and Maps

The NY Times has a long and relatively interesting article on geotagging images and mapping. It primarily discusses Flickr and, to a lesser degree, Google Earth and Picasa and other services such as TripTracker. The article also goes into the geocoding/tagging technology itself. Not discussed in the article is Microsoft's "Photosynth," which is an interesting hypothetical application and extension of all this technology.

Mapping, images (including video) and local/travel are rapidly coming together in very rich applications, as alternatives to pure text-based online navigation.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 2:01 PM | Permalink

August 15, 2006

A Guide to Social Search Players

In yesterday's SearchDay article, What's the Big Deal With Social Search?, I looked at some of the pros and cons of adding human influences to algorithmic search results. In today's SearchDay article, Who's Who in Social Search, I map out the various approaches to social search and offer links to some of the key players in human-mediated search.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 10:27 PM | Permalink

June 6, 2006

Facelift, New Features For Yahoo's MyWeb Bookmark Service

Yahoo's MyWeb bookmark service has gotten a facelift and new features to make it easier than before for people to find what others are saving and sharing on the service. Yahoo MyWeb Gets New Look, Easier Browsing & Viewing Features in today's SearchDay from me covers the changes and revisits how the system works in general.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:04 AM | Permalink

May 10, 2006

Google Co-op: Add Your Own Vertical Search To Google

Google said it would have a health-related announcement at today's Google Press Day -- but no, it's not Google Health. Instead, it's Google Co-op, a way for people to create specialized search engines by tapping into the main Google index or the option for searchers to pick preferred vertical search providers to show up in Google OneBox results. Yes, health information is one of the new features -- but this is more than Google Health. This is Google making a giant and somewhat perplexing leap into mass tagging.

Subscribed Links

Let's start in with the specialty or vertical search providers, what Google calls subscribed links. Many are probably familiar with how for some queries, Google will show what it calls a OneBox result at the top of the "regular" results. For example, a search on san francisco hotels brings up a section like this at the top of the page

Local results for hotels near San Francisco, CA San Francisco Marriott - 1.0 miles NE - 55 4th St, San Francisco, 94103 - (415) 896-1600 Hyatt Hotels & Resorts: Park Hyatt San Francisco - 1.7 miles NE - 333 Battery St, San Francisco, 94111 - (415) 392-1234 Hyatt Hotels & Resorts: Hyatt at Fisherman's Wharf - 2.2 miles N - 555 N Point St, San Francisco, 94133 - (415) 563-1234

Those results are powered by one of Google's own vertical search engine, Google Maps (formerly Google Local). The new subscribed links service lets people choose other non-Google vertical search engines to show at the top of the page, if they want to.

It's a very cool idea. For example, say you are regularly searching for information about search engines and would like to know if Search Engine Watch specifically has any matching info along with searching the entire web for that topic. If we get our act together (and we'll try soon), you could make us one of your subscribed links. Then the next time you search for something where we have content, you might see our matches right at the top of Google.

Where do you find providers? Google's got a currently very small directory of them here to choose from. Preferred partners are already listed, partners that Google thinks people will be especially interested in, not those who have paid. No money is exchanging hands in either direction to be a subscribed link provider, Google says.

Digg is the only news provider listed at the moment. I subscribed to see how it works. Not too well. Perhaps not at all. Searches for Google, Playstation, Nintendo -- all topics on Digg right now -- brought nothing up. Hmm. I tried subscribing to People. Searches on Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie gave me nothing.

Frankly, I don't think the system is working right just yet, as I'll get to further below. I also have a note out to Google about this. In the meantime, let's just pretend it's working. How do we at Search Engine Watch or anyone else get to be in that directory or a subscribed link partner in general.

Here's the guide that allows anyone to get started. I had to laugh at the intro:

The API was designed to be as easy to use as possible, and requires only basic XML skills. This guide will show you how to create subscribed links, with plenty of examples along the way.

I laughed because in short order, I was lost! Barry Schwartz, who is a programmer, still felt lost himself and said he'd through it at "one of his XML guys" tomorrow. In contrast, making a Google Toolbar Button is a heck of a lot easier. I sure wish making subscribed links were, because they are potentially going to be an important new way for people to ensure they are getting traffic from Google.

Anyone can make a subscribed link to offer on via their own site (though the developer guide doesn't go into details about this, such as how to place it). Naturally, what you really want is to be in the directory that Google itself offers. Again, the developer guide doesn't cover this. But this appears to be the submission page.

As for who gets in, Google told me that those included and featured in the directory will be based on user uptake. Get a lot of people subscribing to your results, and you'll more likely be featured to users.

Two last things on Subscribed Links:

First, another OneBox! Just how much can Google shove above the "regular" results. Google tells me that they are currently trying not to show more than two of their own -- so potentially, you might be looking at three in all on the page. You'll never see more than on Subscribed Links OneBoxes, and these will come before Google's own.

Second, if the entire idea feels familiar, you might be recalling Yahoo Subscriptions. That launched last June and is explained more in our Yahoo Search Subscriptions Brings Premium Content Into Web Search article.

I've no idea how popular the service is, but I'm guessing not much, given that most people seem never to have heard of it. Unlike the Google system, the number of partners is very small and there's no API allowing anyone to jump in. Instead, you've got to go the contact form route. I suspect Google's system will be far more popular, since it should have a much wider range of providers.

Labels, Google Health & Vertical Search

A second part of Google Co-op is the ability to allow people to label URLs into different topic areas. You mean tagging! Google still prefers the term label, while I'm still a hold out for saying categories. But whatever the name, it's not like the idea of tagging you might be used to at other places. This is industrial-strength tagging.

For example, with Yahoo My Web 2.0, I can tag any page with any words I prefer. The system is really designed for me to tag on a one-by-one basis. If I do a search, see something I like, I can click the Save button, add a tag, some notes and have that individual page stored for easy recall.

Yes, I can import many pages and assign them all tags en masse. But that doesn't seem to be the case for most people. The system currently has only 1.1 million pages tagged, hardly double the amount I recall it having not long after launching last year. If there were massive tagging imports, I'd expect the number to be higher.

In contrast, Google's label system is initially designed as a more mass tagging system for those who want to create vertical search engines. Google's now rolled out a number of these:

Let's dive into the health area. Sure, call it Google Health if you want -- though Google says a more full-fledged Google Health is coming and definitely doesn't call this Google Health itself. Whatever you all it, this health thing lets you search against pages that have been labeled with the help of contributors such as the Mayo Clinic or the Harvard Medical School as being health-specific.

Ideally, it means that I should be able to do a search and get back only stuff related to health issues. Here's an example. Say I search for cold on regular Google. The first link is for the musical band Cold, and the third link is for Cold Stone Creamery. That's great place for ice cream, but the only health connection is that it might make you fat! Midway down, Macromedia shows up because of its ColdFusion product, then there are two links on the Cold War followed by two links on Cold Mountain.

For regular Google, this variety is fine. Who knows what you want when you search for the word cold? It could be any number of things. But for a health search, you want to get rid of all that junk. Google Health's labels ideally should do this. But go there, then search and what happens? Pretty much nothing. The off-topic stuff I mentioned is still there!

I suspect there's a bug in the system right now. Google Co-op didn't go live when announced, and then it slowly came up. I'll check on this, and the better test will be in a day or so, especially when some of these new topical areas are pitted against existing verticals in various areas. But conceptually, hopefully you'll understand what's happening. In each of the topic areas above, either contributors have helped label content or Google's worked behind-the-scenes to get some of these going.

Keep in mind that for any top level label/topic/category, there are also sublabels/subtopics/subcategories. So for health, you'll see further narrowing options such as:

  • Symptoms
  • Treatment
  • Drug Uses
  • Support Groups

What about for the more individual user that wants to label? Good luck. Here are a bunch of instructions. They make my head spin. Maybe it will spin less when I read it many more times. But compared to tagging elsewhere, it's a nightmare.

Heck, it's a nightmare compared to trying to make a vertical search engine period versus a place like Rollyo. Want to make a health vertical search engine there? Give it up to 25 web sites and you're done.

Google told me it does want to make the process easier for anyone to take part, so hang in there, if the programming stuff makes you feel excluded as it does me.

The downside to Rollyo, compared to what Google's doing, is that you won't have all the refinement and subcategories. But I find it difficult to understand how well these will work, anyway. There's no controlled vocabulary for new people coming in. Moreover, it seems like some of these refinements could be done through clustering. My Yahoo My Web Tagging & Why (So Far) It Sucks article goes into some depth about these types of issues from when Yahoo rolled out My Web 2.0. They seem just as applicable to the new Google label system.

When Yahoo launched My Web 2.0, my gut felt like we were making a big step backwards, using humans to do stuff where technology actually could work. I wrote similar things when Google Base went up, pushing people into tagging content when it might not be necessary.

Don't get me wrong. I want humans involved in the search process. If anything, I've also written about how the growth of crawlers and automation has pushed human help sadly -- and perhaps harmfully to relevance -- to the side.

Certainly it's a big positive that Google's letting humans more in the door this way -- a huge jump for the service that has pretty much looked to technology to solve everything, as it acknowledges.

"We've never given our users this much control and access into our system," said Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products & user experience. "We have an advantage with machines and how we crawl, but if we can turn our users into a network, that will yield better results."

Still, I think the idea of humans sharing and swapping what they like such as with Yahoo My Web or via the recent change with Google Reader might be the better way to go rather than manually tagging up millions of pages of content. But we'll see how it goes. As for the idea of subscribed links -- I've got a big thumbs-up for that part of Google Co-op.

Postscript: Google Blogoscoped has a nice guide to how Google Co-op also works for publishers, though most of the examples shown are more static than dynamic data draws.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:12 PM | Permalink

March 27, 2006

Yahoo Updates Search Toolbar; Tabbed Browsing in IE & Delicious Tags

The Yahoo Search Blog announced that they have updated the Yahoo Toolbar. For IE users, you can use the toolbar to enable tabbed browsing in IE 5 or 6. For Firefox users, they have added for bookmarks, mail alerts, and AntiSpy for all countries that Yahoo supports (and no list of these is given).

In addition to those updates, they are now giving users the ability to tag content with del.icio.us directly from the browser. It is an optional feature that can be turned on by clicking here if the toolbar is already installed. If not, you can find the option under the Add/Edit Buttons page in the "Personal Tools" section. This move makes practical sense, since Yahoo Acquired Del.ico.us. Oh, you know del.icio.us is hard to spell, when Yahoo has a typo in the blog entry ("del.icio.us ito save").

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:52 AM | Permalink

March 22, 2006

Social Bookmarking Made Easy By Socializer

I reported on a tool named Socializer, an automated social bookmarking service that you can easily add to your content. This service easily allows you to add a link to your content; the link directs you to a page that looks like this. The page has icons of dozens of social bookmarking Web sites, including Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit, Furl and more. Social bookmarking, i.e. tagging, is considered by some the new form of link popularity. If you agree with that or not, tagging your content, does help get your content out there, which does give you a better shot at getting more links to your pages.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:15 AM | Permalink

Google Jumps Into Social Tagging With New Google Reader Feature

Philipp Lenssen notes that the Google Reader Blog has announced that you can now share the content you read with your friends, family, colleagues and others. This is a big move for Google, what seems to be the first time they've allowed people to both tag and importantly share that tagged content with others.

Google's had tagging in the form of "labels" at Gmail for some time and recently added (and also see here) bookmark/tagging features to the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer. However, items you tagged couldn't be shared with others.

In contrast, Yahoo allows people to share tagged content through its My Web 2.0 service, not to mention owning two posterchilds of the tag-and-share movement, del.icio.us and Flickr.

Now Google's on the sharing scene. Perhaps they'll even begin saying "tags" rather than "labels," as they did originally in the Google Reader announcement, only to later fall back to the preferred term of labels:

Additionally, if you use the tagging labeling feature of Reader, you can label items and share them.

To begin sharing your reading lists or add a clip to your blog, go to reader.google.com and open the Share tab. Check the 'shared' check box to opt-in to sharing your starred items or selected labels.

For examples, Philipp shared this page as items labeled "google". You can also share your "starred" pages.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:08 AM | Permalink

December 3, 2005

Collaborative Web Tagging Will Be Topic of Workshop at WWW 2006

Collaborative taggers should tag the following item, "workshop."

The RawSugar Blog (RawSugar is a social search engine (beta) with over 135,000 URLs tagged by members since its public beta launched 2 months ago) is announcing that a collaborative web tagging workshop is a go at the 2006 World Wide Web Conference (WWW2006) in Edinburgh in May. So far Frank Smadja, RawSugar’s VP of Engineering, Scott Golder of HP Labs and Andrew Tomkins from Yahoo Research are set to participate. Others who have been invited to speak are listed in the blog post. Contact Frank, Scott, or Andrew if you're interested in contributing.

More about RawSugar itself in this just posted interview with its CEO, Ofer Ben-Shachar.

Posted by Gary Price at 1:13 AM | Permalink

November 2, 2005

Tagging + Online Games: Search that Actually Works!

We're mostly in the "tagging sucks" camp here at SEW, not because we're opposed to metadata (we're not), but rather because the benefits offered by tags are obliterated by spammers or idiots who misuse them. So far, the examples of tagging we've seen are underwhelming, often characterized by poor search.

But in the right circumstances, tagging can be a powerful tool that actually works the way that proponents say it should. I've found a site where tagging seems to deliver on its promise, and have more about it in today's SearchDay article, Where Tagging Works: Searching for a Good Game.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 10:15 AM | Permalink

October 11, 2005

Google Lets You Manually Save & Tag Results Through New Bookmarks Feature

Google Adds Tagging from Nathan over at InsideGoogle is a nice look at how Google now gives you the ability to manually save results via a new "Bookmarks" feature and assign labels and notes to them. He calls it tagging, while Google uses the term "labels." I suppose the only difference is that tags are often used for content shared with others, and so far, none of what you tag within Google Search History gets shared.

First, the how it works part. You have to be using Google Personalized Search, also explained more in our past article, Google Relaunches Personal Search - This Time, It Really Is Personal.

If you are using that, you'll automatically have your searches recorded. However, the new Bookmarks lets you manually save any results you might want to file away.

Next to any item in in your Search History results, you'll see a star. Click on the star, and you'll have saved the item. You'll also see a new Edit link appear. Click on that, and you can add labels/tags or organize items and also notes.

For example, I could save items about cars under the "cars" label and items about mp3 players under the "mp3 players" label. I could also assign an item with both labels, if I wanted to. After doing this, I'll then have these labels showing up under the Bookmarks heading on the left-hand side of the page. Clicking on a label link brings back the results I've tagged this way.

I found the label system buggy, however. Supposedly, you could type in a bunch of labels separated by commas, such as:

apples, bananas, oranges

In fact, text in the label box encourages you to do just that. But if I try to under commas (using Firefox 1.6), they simply won't take. Instead, I have to save with one label, reedit, add a comma and the next label, save, and so on. Hopefully, it's either just a problem I'm having or a problem everyone's having that will get fixed soon.

None of the labels or tags you save for a result will show up if you do a regular search and see a result you've tagged in the future, as how Yahoo's My Web works. I thought that's how Ask Jeeves also worked, but it doesn't appear to be the case when I looked again today. But like Yahoo, you can save and tag and annotate results with the Ask Jeeves My Jeeves service.

Overall, Google's playing catch-up here. It's definitely nice to have the new feature, and I want that in addition to automatically saving, but there's no new ground being broken with this. Indeed, what's especially needed is for the feature to jump out of being within the Search History area and into Google's main results.

What I mean is this. If you're logged into Google and using personalized search, you can't save anything in the results you get back. Instead, you can only save and edit results that are automatically saved after you click on them.

I want the feature to evolve similar to what you see at Yahoo, where you can manually save a result and annotate it right within the regular results page.

Google recently mimicked Yahoo's Block feature by adding a "Remove result" link to the listings anyone sees when using Google Personalized Search. Making a step beyond that to add Save, Label & Note buttons similar to what Yahoo does, as well as Ask Jeeves and even AOL, is a no brainer step to make.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:18 AM | Permalink

October 6, 2005

Wink & Web 2.0 Search Panel

Web 2.0: Looking for new ideas in search is a short rundown on new entries into the search space talking at the Web 2.0 conference this week. Search Panel - Web 2.0 from ClickZ covers the same panel. Both focus mainly on Wink is a tag-based search engine and backing TagCamp to help create a standard tagging taxonomy. PubSub also talked of wanting to have more standard ways to structure information.

In case you missed it, tags were hot but don't seem to be as hot as in the past, as the problems with tagging that anyone should have expected have cropped up. But now "camps" are hot in the wake of FooCamp and BarCamp (for those not lucky enough to be invited to FooCamp) and campish-Web. 2.1. So add some camp to your tags, and they're hot again!

Actually, camps sound pretty cool. I want to do SearchCamp, except it would be for kids, teaching them to search better.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:39 AM | Permalink

June 30, 2005

A Search Marketer's Look At Yahoo My Web 2.0

For Search Engine Watch members, I've posted A Search Marketer's Look At Yahoo My Web 2.0, which looks at how search marketers may -- or may not -- have an impact on Yahoo's new My Web 2.0 system that Chris Sherman covered yesterday. Among the topics I address:

  • The difference between "regular" Yahoo versus Yahoo My Web 1.0 and 2.0 from the perspective of what a searcher sees.  
  • A revisit of how My Web 1.0's block and save links work.  
  • How My Web 2.0 pushes down "regular" results, making it important to understand My Web 2.0 better. A screenshot from the story speaks volumes about this. Regular Yahoo is on the left, and Yahoo for a My Web 2.0 user is on the right:

  • How My Web 2.0 users are more likely to detour into My Web 2.0 results.  
  • How My Web 2.0 result listings are generated uniquely for each user based on what they and their community saves.  
  • How the MyRank system uses a person's community to rank keyword-driven search results, along with other key factors.  
  • How tagged results are the way to see what "everyone" is interested in and how searchers will probably end up in the most popular tags.  
  • How the tags currently seem extremely vulnerable to tag cloud bombing, with an example of me pushing the two highlighted tags below into the top results with little effort:

  • How Yahoo might solve the problem, along with how it says more defenses are going into place (see also this article I've posted for everyone today on tagging issues).  
  • An long-term strategy to ensure your fresh content is feeding into tag areas in an appropriate, searcher-friendly manner.  
  • How the tags are effectively about to become the world's largest collection of Free For All link pages but how that might also change.  
  • More tips on how to import and feed content into the system, including the need to use RSS 1.0 rather than RSS 2.0 currently, if you want to import categories to become tags.  
  • The wish for Yahoo to roll out a "Save To My Web" button that you can feature to your visitors similar to the Add To My Yahoo button already offered that site owners can display to visitors and tips on getting saved until that happens.  
  • How to appropriate extend your network or reach others who may want to see your content.  
  • Making use of notes for reputation management  
  • How the trust network will grow to impact ranking of all Yahoo results, not just My Web ones.

Though written for marketers in mind, anyone interested in more about how the My Web 2.0 system works should find the article useful. As said, it's offered to those who support Search Engine Watch by becoming members -- support that's greatly appreciated by your hard working editors over here!

Also posted on the blog are these related articles today:

Plus there's Chris Sherman's overview article from yesterday, Yahoo Integrates Personal & Social Search with My Web 2.0. Want to discuss or comment on any of this? Visit our forum thread, New Yahoo My Web 2.0 & MyRank.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:32 PM | Permalink

Yahoo My Web Tagging & Why (So Far) It Sucks In my Yahoo My Web: An eBay For Knowledge article out today, I cover the promise that Yahoo My Web has for potentially improving search results through trust networks. As for the promise of tagging to improve results, I find myself just as dubious as I've been about tagging.

Where to begin? I could let Gary run lose with a litany of complaints. In fact, he probably will share his own perspectives in the near future. But I'll dive in on the problems as I see them.

Double Duty

Most important, the tags are in the impossible position -- one that even Yahoo admits when I talked with them about this -- of trying to do two things at once that aren't compatible. They are:

  • Trying to show the freshest content on a topic
  • Trying to show the best content on a topic

At the moment, neither situation is happening. Freshness is determined by when a document was saved. So if I save the iPod home page under the tag of ipod (link viewable only to My Web 2.0 users), there's nothing "fresh" about it except that I've just added it. The page has been around for ages. The mere act of saving it didn't make it fresh.

In contrast, the new iTunes 4.9 software with support for podcasting is new. If someone adds that, it's a nice way to alert others monitoring this topic to the latest about iPods.

Fresh Versus Best

Tagging at a specialized search engine like Technorati doesn't face the double-duty challenge. Technorati is dealing primarily with feed and blog content. That content by its very nature is fresh in some way. In other words, no one is blogging, "Hey, here's the iPod web site" and feeding it as fresh news via the Technorati ipod tag. People are for the most part -- aside from spammers -- saying something new or offering a fresh opinion about iPods and things related to iPods.

As a result, if you want to tune into the latest stuff about iPods, the relatively specialized and fresh content that Technorati gathers can be found via tags. The new Live 8 area is a good example of this.

In contrast, if you want to find a general good resource about a subject, the tags at Technorati suck. Where's the official Live 8 web site? It's not at the top of the recent blog posts for the Live 8 page. The only reason it's on that tag page at all is because Technorati made a customized, special page for the event. For a regular page, go back to the ipod tag page and try to find the official iPod home page. You won't.

Directories Were For Categorized Best Stuff

Showing a list of the best content on a categorized topic -- as opposed to the freshest content -- is the role traditionally filled by directories such as Yahoo's own Yahoo Directory. Look at the Live 8 category there. It's sparse, surprisingly so (or perhaps not given Yahoo's general abandonment of its directory, but at least it has something at all, unlike the Open Directory). But nonetheless, you have no problem finding the official site and top resources about the event, including Technorati's page!

iPod? When I looked at the Technorati tag page for this, one of the top things listed was someone spamming to sell me sunglasses using a gibberish page which was tagged as being about iPods. Meanwhile, Yahoo's iPod category shows the official site first along with a bunch of resources that look good and are focused broadly about iPods.

Well what about del.icio.us? People are bookmarking general information over there, right, not just fresh stuff! Are they? Whenever I look, it seems like people are busy bookmarking a lot of new stuff.

Looking at the google tag today, I saw bookmarks about the new Google Earth service or the new Google Maps API. How about ipod? Some new stuff, some old stuff -- and the same result you get with Yahoo. Stuff that's "fresh" isn't necessarily so, while the popular view shows me only "recently" popular stuff rather than what I'd call "always popular" such as the iPod home page.

Tagging In The Verticals

How about Yahoo-owned Flickr? Yahoo talked to me this week about how 70 percent of all items on Flickr are tagged, but then it immediately qualified without prompting that because Flickr is a photo service, tagging is much more essential.

Indeed -- if you don't tag a picture, you pretty much have no good way of finding it. Tagging makes much, much sense in a photo space. And I love photo tagging. Check out my Photo Search: Google Picasa 2 Vs. Adobe Photoshop Album 2 article from earlier this year. I tag like a madman with Photoshop Album. I live to tag!

You know what? I'm weird. And people tagging on Flickr? They're weird as well. Weird in a good, organized way. Go talk to people you know who have digital cameras -- not your net happy friends but relatively ordinary people or don't work in some net-related industry. They aren't tagging, not on their computers and not with Flickr. Maybe they will eventually, but it's far more likely it will only happen among the masses in areas where tagging is really useful and essential. For general web search, it's not.

Tagging -- like spontaneity -- has time and a place. For some verticals, as I've written, it may make more sense. That's especially so for relatively little services that aren't going to be spam targets. But tagging web listings in general so far makes me think Yahoo's not going to please anyone.

Stepping Backwards

It gets worse, by the way. Tagging will help you keep all your My Web content you're saving organized, right? But what happens when you've created hundreds of tags for thousands of pages? Are you going to browse pages? Everyone largely abandoned browsing directory categories ages ago because keyword search was like a warp drive to zip you to what you wanted, as I've explained.

If you really do save thousands of pages over time, you're not going to want to rely on tagging to locate things. You'll probably just keyword search. Even more so, that will be essential, as the tags you initially created probably won't hold up as things change over time. Do you retag everything? Chances are, you won't.

Another backwards step example? We've had automated clustering technology for ages that will put content into categories, or tag them, if you prefer that term. Check out Clusty, an example using Vivisimo's long-developed tech.

Yahoo bought two different search engines -- AltaVista and AllTheWeb -- that also had clustering that no longer gets offered. Yahoo's own current technology is even used to create the Yahoo News Tag Soup "tag cloud" that I wrote about last month, tech you can now apply to any site or collection of sites you'd like.

Why not use this tech to organized My Web automatically into tags? At the very lest, it would avoid problems like the "important bookmarks" tag being so large in My Web's current tag cloud, something that annoys Gary to no end.

It might also help with the short term tag cloud bombing problem I'm sure that's going to emerge. Look at this:

That's from the A Search Marketer's Look At Yahoo My Web 2.0 article I just posted. In about 15 minutes of work, I popped up "rio karma" and "mp3 player" into the cloud. They won't last, but neither was I working particularly hard to make it happen. Tag cloud spamming at the moment seems incredibly easy.

Yahoo says it has defenses in place that will stop this, stuff that will ramp up as needed. We'll see. But just having just having to have those defenses at all reeks of another step backwards. Rather than tags solving the search spam problem, an entire new way to eliminate tag spam is going to be developed -- just as search spam has had to endure an arms race of defensive measures.

One more step backwards example. As mentioned, some people are looking to tags to keep up with what's new. There's another way to do this. You create keyword-based news alerts to monitor new stuff.

The problem with the major search engines is that keyword-driven news alerts they offer aren't tapping into blog and feed content. That could be fixed over night. And news alerts help ensure that if you're looking for information on podcasts, you might get it even if someone "tagged" what you wanted in the completely different "podcasting" category.

I still miss Excite's awesome NewsTracker service that we had way back in 1997. But there are plenty of good replacements that will automatically scan for stuff on the news sites, and I covered a few here recently. Hopefully we'll see the majors come up with ways for you to flag keywords you wish to monitor in blog and news content, in the way Technorati's Watchlists work or as PubSub allows, to name only two such services.

Nice To Have, Just Don't Expect Much

It's important to note that the long term plan for Yahoo ISN'T to use tags to refine web results. As my other article out today discusses, Yahoo is depending on trust data to improve results. That will be applied to the keyword data primarily inherent in the pages themselves, as well as link data. Tagging will have a role, but not the dominant one. It certainly won't take over for organizing.

That's one reason my long term view isn't to worry about it. Tags are there for those who want them, which is good -- very good. They will be useful to some people, especially so when limited to particular communities. When Yahoo introduces popularity sorting, general tags viewed by everyone might even get better. But as long as they have to do double-duty, I suspect they still won't fulfill either role particularly well.

In contrast, an alternative would be for Yahoo to experiment with some type of social compilation of its actual directory, similar to what I suggested about an Open Directory alternative last month. Let me tag the "best" stuff on a particular topic separately from something that's just fresh, new, cool but not the best in the long term. It would be interesting to see how those two different lists developed.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:17 AM | Permalink

June 28, 2005

Yahoo Blends Personal & Social Search with MyWeb 2.0

Sometimes the best way to get information is to simply ask a friend or other trusted associate. Yahoo is now extending that idea to web search with MyWeb 2.0, which allows users to create their own "personal web" collections, and then allow trusted associates to search within those results. It's an intriguing idea that's moving the concept of mass media toward "my media," according to Yahoo's Eckart Walther who led development of the project. Today's SearchDay article, Yahoo Integrates Personal, Social Search with MyWeb 2.0 has an in-depth review of the new service.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 11:13 PM | Permalink

June 23, 2005

Improving Image Search With User Rankings

John Battelle points at a post from Thomas Hawk where he argues that image search would be improved through tagging but more important, through user ratings of pictures. Sure. That's an extension of the idea that any type of search results could be improved through making use of personalization user data. But the key is trusting those doing the ranking.

I've covered before that a small community like Flickr faces completely different issues related to spamming than the major players face. If user rankings drive a picture to the top of Google Images, then some people are going to look at how to manipulate those rankings. That's not to say you don't want to try it. You do, and it could definitely help. But it's not necessarily an out-of-the-box solution.

Also, while this might be the perfect picture for "bridesmaids" to Hawk and nearly 300 others who call it a favorite at Flickr, that doesn't mean it's actually the best picture on that topic. In fact, the other results he points at from Google, Yahoo and MSN are all great if you're a bride perhaps wanting various pictures of bridesmaids in dresses as you ponder your own choice.

In contrast, Hawk's perfect picture is terrible from that perspective. As always, relevancy is largely subjective. And what's awesome photography to a photographer may not be the perfect image to someone thinking from a different perspective.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:38 AM | Permalink

Yahoo Wanted Flickr For The Tags (& Tagging Community)

Talk time: Jerry Yang from the Guardian interviews Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang. Why did Yahoo buy Flickr? To leverage its leading technology and features, including tagging. Honestly, setting up tagging without buying Flickr couldn't be that hard. But buying a social network that's already tagging things? That makes more sense from a value perspective. If those at Flickr are already tagging photos, what else might they tag for you? Yang discusses the current Yahoo push that "mass media" will become "my media" and that social communities will shape this. So social search? Yes, social search is in the cards, as the company discussed recently at Supernova. Yang also talks about changes at Yahoo over the past 10 years and the convergence of media.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:55 AM | Permalink

May 2, 2005

Forget Desktop Search -- Tag Your Content With Longhorn

While Apple's touting its bundled desktop search as a leading feature of its new OS, Microsoft is downplaying the idea that many once had that desktop search would be a killer component of its next-generation Windows operating system, Longhorn. Will Longhorn Try to Rival Google? from the IDG news service write that Longhorn will instead aim to provide visualization and tagging tools to help people better organize information. While I've been dubious about tagging for web wide search, I'm a huge fan when it comes to desktop matters. My Photo Search: Google Picasa 2 Vs. Adobe Photoshop Album 2 looks at that in more depth.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 1:21 PM | Permalink

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