"Tagging"

Yes, am back.
I know it 's really been a long time since i last posted. But was having a busy time.

Anyway, was just musing over the current trend, ok, lemme change that last word to "trends" of searching.

1. On one side we are looking at tags based searching.
   
2. On the other side, we see search continuing as we know it, i.e. plain text based searching, i.e. a crawler crawls the web, retrieves text, and keywords are noted in a database. Any person wanting to search any text types it, and the database retrieves the locations where that text is present.
   

Yes, each of the above has it's own pros and cons.

Major players, in the search segment seem to be going in one direction or the other (i dont think taking both up is exactly an option). And looks like pretty soon (around 1 year) down the line, a winner will be chosen, who else "the users", of course.

But does that mean the other one will die, or let me word it better "Do you think that the other one is a loser?"

My opinion:
Nope, i, as the user will win. It will not make any difference whether i use one of the web sites or the other. What i need to search about will be complete, and thats what matters to me in the end.

Consider this simple example:

You are searching about vertigo, it's causes and how it can be over come.

1. A person named "XYZ" is a "highly ranked" blogger, he especially writes about his trekking trips. He decides to write about a trekking incident, and especially mentions about "vertigo", which he suddenly seems to be suffering from. Many persons have read this article, are impressed and name their links to this blog post as "XYZ overcomes vertigo".
   
2. A person named "ABC" has researched about vertigo, and has made available a blog post about the causes, effects, etc. etc. She does not have too many hits, on her page, and so is one who is not credible about
   

I am pretty sure you will want ABC's article more than XYZ's, (atleast until u complete the search).

What will a text-based search result in? XYZ (unless, of course AI comes into the picture). But in case the tagging of the post is done properly, i.e. ABC tags the article with words such as "vertigo", "causes", etc. Tagging is the one which will win.

Afer all, the contributor of a post is the best judge as to "what the contribution is about". The search engines will slowly move towards a "knowledge searching" mechanism, instead of an "information searching" mechanism which is currently being done.

Hmm... i guess, the best option will to start tagging all my posts. So that search engines of the future will be able to point out my posts :).


P.S. I remember about the "knowledge management sytem", which my friends and me were trying to build, as a part of the college project. It was very primitive, having only a text based search for the tags given. But i am sure with a little bit of AI put in, it can be moved on to a great "product". Hmm... need to think about that.

technorati tags : Tag Based Searching, Tagging