Charlene Li, one of my favorite analysts and bloggers, posts her thoughts on the purchase of del.icio.us – Yahoo! buys del.icio.us, puts tagging on the map.
“This is important because tagging will (be) key to creating better search.”
“But tagging in of itself isn’t enough – it’s also the reputation of the taggers that’s important.”
“Tags on Web pages provide an additional level of relevancy to that page, and Yahoo! will be in a prime position to leverage it.”
But Greg Linden posts the following interesting points in response to Charlene’s post:
“There seems to be some disagreement about whether "tagging will [be] key to creating better search.
For example, Danny Sullivan said, "All the interest (dare I say hype) is largely ignoring the fact that we've had tagging on the web for going on 10 years, and the experience on the search side is that it can't be trusted."
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050322-163753
John Dvorak said, "Nobody outside the groupthink community really cares about any of this" and that "the 'folksonomy' notion ... is doomed to failure" because it will succumb to "vandalism and spam."
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1819101,00.asp
And Stephen Green said, "[Tagging is] not really a new way of indexing documents, it's actually an old way that didn't work very well."
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/searchguy/20050513#tags_keywords_and_inconsistency”
Wow, that’s quite a contrast in opinions! :- )
As a taxonomy ‘geek’, I’ve worked extensively with user-assigned tags in the job search arena and found the results to be better than no tagging, but very far from ideal. There is just too much variance among user opinion … if we can’t agree on whether a tomato is a to-MAY-toe or a to-MAA-toe, how can we agree on the tagging of jobs, where there is so much diversity of duties and titles?
Even trained coders, using a standardized occupational taxonomy, have trouble exceeding 50% accuracy on a consistent basis. And if we can’t tag the jobs consistently and accurately, the tags provide little value in improving search.
But this doesn’t mean tagging jobs is a dead-end (although I’m not convinced user-assigned tags are helpful). What does work is the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to analyze job titles and descriptions to generate tags at a 90+% accuracy rate.
Our research proves (at least to our satisfaction) that combining these AI-assigned tags with new job search algorithms, leveraging the tags, dramatically improves the job search experience. So I have to agree with Charlene – tagging will be key to creating better search. But I’m putting my money on AI-assigned tags rather than folksonomy.
Comments