A Social Life

Tagging vs. Searching May 23, 2006

Posted by Steve in : tagging, search , trackback

Two recent articles have helped me reframe my thinking a little regarding the relationship between tagging & search.
Quoting Tony Karrer quoting me:

I personally have found that because I’ve switched to Yahoo MyWeb that has full-text search across my bookmarked pages, I’ve come to use tags mostly to represent two things:

Actions - I tag items with “blogthis” if I plan to come back an write it up in a blog.

Sharing - I tag items that I plan to share with a specific tag so that others in my group can find it.

So for me, it’s not quite the folksonomy effect that most people talk about, but based on these articles, I’m starting to think that’s what other people are finding as well.

And from Bill Ives’ Where Tagging Works and Where Tagging Doesn’t Work:

If I want to search on a key word, I will still go to Google as the most efficient way. If I have the time to go exploring through multiple links and see the interrelations between key words, I might go to del.icio.us. However, if I want to set up a way to store and share links on a particular topic, I will use del.icio.us which I have done already in co-authoring an article.

A lot of people (myself included) have tended to more or less equate tagging with “del.icio.us”. Delicious doesn’t search well, and google doesn’t tag well. That creates some kind of artificial distinction between “tagging” and “searching”. As a result, people get distracted trying to demonstrate the (re-)findability value of social software (perhaps because search is so generally useful that impact on search has become the easiest measurement of value?)

But when you use a service like Yahoo MyWeb the two are no longer so separate. That scenario better demonstrates the (IMHO) best uses of bookmarking/tagging:

personal collections,
easy publishing & syndication,
and aggregation/recommendations (article forthcoming )

Search benefits from these but (in my opinion) that really isn’t the intended purpose of tagging. And search isn’t the only point of integration that will benefit from the addition of social features…