MappingTheWeb //

Let’s head back to the SEO days of the late 90’s. META tags were all the rage, most notably META keywords. Now back to 2007… The use of such ‘indicators’ is coming full-swing. Although the ‘META keywords’ phrase is now shunned upon, tagging tends to be a concept that many accept with open arms. At the core, they are essentially the same thing. A user or publisher is providing a word or phrase (i.e. metadata or context) to a given page in this case. However, the amount people that provide this data is the difference.

Some are saying that this type system may provide more accurate and relevant results than other search algorithms, most notably Google’s.

Social bookmarking sites essentially allow a large audience to tag individual pages all over the web. It is similar to providing META keywords, but on a much larger scale. I call it ‘tagging by the masses’. Hopefully the wisdom of the crowds is more pertinent than a computer-based algorithm.

One downfall of such a system is the possibility of gaming or cheating. Mismatched tags and spam can ultimately lead to personal financial gain (for some), as well as inferior results for the user. Though this is easier to accomplish using a tag-based system, gaming is still widespread within traditional, algorithm-based search engines as well. Search engine optimized, AdWords-smothered pages still continue to appear in the results, although an effort has been made to eliminate them.

Perhaps one of the traditional, ‘lagging’ search engine should look at incorporating tag-based results in their own algorithm or results. A risk such as this could provide a spark or catalyst that Ask or MSN so desperately needs.