Tagging, Search and the Wisdom of Crowds

Thanks to Steve Rubel for flagging. BusinessWeek has posted a great story on tagging, a technology that adds a "layer of social knowledge" to the world of search. The article provides a nice comparison of search and tagging, concluding that tagging may in fact add a much needed new dimension for organizing the ever-growing amount of content on the Web. The social dimension -- a big theme on this blog -- is becoming more and more relevant.

Search engines, for all their advances in recent years, have a glaring drawback: No matter how many pages they index or how quickly they bring back results, they can't put those results into context. They can find a specific word, but they can't figure out what the word means. An example: Look up the word "python" on Google, and the list of results throws together sites about the reptile, the programming language, even Monty Python. You have to sift through pages of irrevelant results to find what you want. To help avoid the confusion, Web sites often manually label their pages with category titles, a version of tags called metadata. But mass search engines, such as Google, don't use metadata because they can contain spam or misleading descriptions.

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Tagging, however, lacks the algorithmic wizardry of search engines. But it lets people work together organically to create the context traditional search typically misses. Blogger Thomas Vander Wal coined the word "folksonomy," a combination of the words folk and taxonomy, to describe this joint work. It's like a grassroots Dewey Decimal Classification System for the Web. The essence: The combined work of people busily tagging content creates another way to make sense of the mountains of information online.