Lee Iverson

One there are a hundred or thousand responses to a search engine query the primary distinguishing feature of one search engine from another (besides speed) is the ordering of the responses. The main reason Google worked so much better than their competitors initially was the PageRank algorithm. What Sergey Brin and Larry Page figured out was that how many people are talking about you and what they are saying is more important than what you say about yourself. In essence, all the search engines that preceded Google did textual and structural analysis of the web page itself and created match values with key words on the page in order to calculate the strength of match with each query keyword. Brin and Page figured out that a link is primarily used as an attestation of authority and that the description of a page near its link location is more precise and significant than the page content itself. In other words it uses the "wisdom of crowds" to select pages that best match key words.

Tagging (in the del.icio.us style) has exactly this property. The primary differences are 1) that tags are open and attributed, and 2) that tagging is easier and more dynamic than building a web page. In essence tag systems mirror the pagerank structure of Google's system, but make the internal structures browsable and viewable directly. The consequence of this, and the primary strength of tagging systems, is that tagged structures are more trustable and harder to spoof or spam than search engines.

That said, they need to get better. I need to be able to express who I trust and especially who I don't. I need to express what information I trust from these sources and again what I don't (I may completely agree with a person's perspective on technology but abhor their politics). There's so much more that can and should be done with these systems...

Technorati Tags: del.icio.us, tagging, google.