Search Oriented Tagging
September 30th, 2008 by jeremychone 
Tagging has been a relatively popular, human-driven method for organically categorizing information on the Web. Users are now accustomed to tagging the content that they are publishing or bookmarking.
However, by design, tagging requires users to have some sort of writing privilege, which greatly limits its reach potential. Practically speaking, it means that if a user wants to tag an item on a system (e.g, Youtube, Flickr, or delicious) he or she must have an account on that system and be logged in at the time of the operation.
While this is probably not an issue for major Internet services, it can be a chicken-and-egg issue for new, upcoming services that do not yet have a large enough community to build a meaningful tag cloud. How can a new service maximize its community tag cloud if it doesn’t yet have a community?
Here is where the concept of Search Oriented Tagging comes in. The concept is that users do not tag anymore but just search. The service will extract keywords from the search query and track the user’s interaction with the results. The system will then apply statistical logic to automatically tag the interacted entities.
Although this approach is not intended to be a substitute for traditional tagging, it can also complement tagging mechanisms for large community sites.
Search-oriented tagging offers these benefits:
- Maximizes tagging participation: By transforming tagging into a registration-free functionality, search-oriented tagging maximizes its reach to the service’s full audience (i.e., registered users and visitors)
- Scales with the community: Search-oriented tagging’s statistical nature scales well with site content and community growth.
- Search synergy: Since the function is search-centric, this form of tagging can refine the search relevance logic.
- Time-sensitive: Since search-oriented tagging is more transparent and pervasive, it can better capture time-sensitive tags such as "harmony," "Google Chrome," or "lipstick on a Pig."
I am sure that this concept is not entirely new, and that search engines have similar logic to improve their results relevance. However, by applying this concept to tagging, new services can more effectively build a relevant tag cloud while developing their communities. The concept can also be applied to large community services to make their tagging systems more agile and time-sensitive.
If you aware of any services that are using this mechanism, feel free to submit a comment.
January 2nd, 2009 at 1:14 pm
I think this idea makes the most sense, however I can see people getting up in arms about personal liberties and having their searches tracked by “big brother”. Then again you are using someone else’s search engine so you should play by their rules.
Technically speaking, this is by far the best idea to develop tags without membership and should cut down on spammers gaming the system with a billion tags.
February 6th, 2009 at 6:39 am
I use a “lijit” search widget that creates a tag cloud based on the searches of my readers. It’s pretty cool, and it also allows you to integrate your blog search with other blogs.
February 8th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
Thanks Kevin, I’ll try that widget and see how it is. I always did like using plugins such as Lijit to boost blog power and rankings (and making my readers happy).
February 18th, 2009 at 9:23 am
I believe that tagging is a double edged sword when it comes to search engine optimization. On the one hand tags create a separate page to link back to the content of ones site/blog but on the other hand they create duplicate content that can take away from someones rankings.
April 6th, 2009 at 12:29 am
Tagging has been a relatively popular, human-driven method for organically categorizing information on the Web. Users are now accustomed to tagging the content that they are publishing or bookmarking.
“Good site”