Information Research Weblog

There was recently a column on, I think, ZDNet in which the author said that he thought that Google's stock would go down hill in 2006, in part because 'social tagging', in the mode of del.icio.us would come to dominate the search market, and Google didn't have such a system.

There's an awful lot of hype about this, these days, but those hyping appear not to realise two things: first, 'social tagging' is an informal analogue of what Google actually does in a more systematic manner. The page rank algorithm, although secret, is known to rank pages on the basis of the extent to which they are cited by others. Sounds a lot as though the links at the top of the output are the result of a 'social' decision, doesn't it? Secondly, where do those who contribute their links to del.icio.us find the pages? My guess is that they use Google; so what is being reported is what Google finds in the first place.

And they tell me that this haphazard process of a limited number of people (against the millions who actually use the Web - and use Google for their searches) submitting their links, is going to lead to a better search system? Crazy in my opinion.

'Tagging' is also proposed as a new phenomenon. But what is it? Simply 'indexing'. Of course, the 'tagging' term is promoted by people who know nothing about indexing, have probably never heard the term and imagine that assigning a keyword or a phrase to a document is something novel. This is how fads begin! All we need is the proposal that 'social tagging' is a new 'knowledge management' technique and we'll know that it is about to die :-)