As far as I can tell, Google uses information within a web page and the
links to the page containing the text to determine a page's relevance. I recently opened an account with del.icio.us mainly
to bookmark my Google links and access it from any computer (home,
work or elsewhere). For each link, del.icio.us asks for a description
and tags. Once we submit our tags, we can see who else has tagged
those very same pages. Users can then navigate to that persons page
and see other pages that they have tagged. Using this feature, I was
able to access many Goolge related sites. This experience reminded me
of Amazon.com recommendations. Amazon makes recommendations by
analyzing customer transaction records and deriving similarities.
Google should add this feature and recommend pages based on user
queries. The main question for Google is -- will imperfect social
tags do better than their page ranking algorithm? Should they use a
hybrid approach? Is social tagging next for Google?
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