While reading MovableBlog’s commentary on Google’s “Similar Pages” feature, which I mostly agreed with, I began to consider what, if I don’t use “Similar Pages” (I don’t), might be a good replacement. First thought? Something like del.icio.us Linkbacks. Use case would be searching Google and having an inline link – pre-click-through – to determine its relevance to the del.icio.us population. Ideally the results would be automatically returned in my search as on the upgraded del.icio.us itself, but for scalability reasons I don’t think that’s feasible right now. But how to do this? Google’s fairly user responsive, but like any widely available service I can’t expect rapid change.
Well, what about a GreaseMonkey script? If Butler can strip out ads and the like, I’m sure GM has the ability to do just what I’m thinking. So if anybody out there on the LazyWeb is looking for a reason to play with the Mozilla plugin, maybe this is it. Or equally possible, someone’s already thought of this and done it in which case I’d much appreciate a pointer.
All of that in turn got me thinking about how the major search engines might begin to exploit the tagging engines interally. Put more clearly, I think it’s only a matter of time until one of the major search engines begins providing human relevance in its returned results. Not top down like About.com (recently snapped up by the Times), but bottom up in true folksonomic style. Makes you wonder what something like del.icio.us is worth at this point, not because of the technology which while I’m sure is not trivial is probably doable for any of the major players, but for the accumulated data store which is the product of folks like me who’ve heavily invested in tagging for the productivity benefits.
Google lost out on one of the major tagging players in Flickr, might it step up for del.icio.us? There are only so many repositories of user owned and managed data around, and they – unlike the technology – are not easy to replicate. Makes sense on more than a few levels, and according to Steve Gillmor PaidContent.org’s readers can see the acquisition logic. Lest someone think I’m guilty of pre-bubble thinking, and am just getting carried away with tagging as a fad, I’ll answer the critical question of how del.icio.us could enhance Google’s business. It’s pretty simple: tagged results along with occasional commentary deliver additional context for the links Google returns on a search. That context has the potential to make Google’s returns more accurate and more relevant. Anyone think that’s something Google’d be interested in and could monetize? Or maybe I should ask if anyone thinks that’s not the case.
