Lately we’ve seen a lot of discussion about the role of folksonomies, search engines and traditional classifications. The conclusion seemed to be that folksonomies suggest a serendipity approach to information retrieval, while taxonomies and search engines (in two different ways) are more useful for a targeted, specific search.

But the question is:

• Search engines and tagging really represent two different approaches to information retrieval?
• Can they be merged in a new generation of search tools?

Shreveport was an idea for a project never released from nForm and Gene Smith. That idea was both an implicit and effortless way to integrate folksonomies into the search process.

That project would basically consist in a search engine with some social software concepts layered on top. The search engine would trasparently aggregate information contained into search logs “attaching” search terms choosen by users to URLs retrieved by the engine.

In other words the search engine would tag urls with the terms that users insert to find that urls.

Building on the information acquired, a clever algorithm would then create a communities based on common interests (represented by common search terms).

Some key points are:

• Search terms are tags on an URL. Shreveport associates tags with URLs based on clickthroughs.
• Search history is shared. Search terms and selected results are shared in the same way del.icio.us shares tags and URLs….
• Search terms and results selection help improve search results. Part of our largely hypothetical algorithmic mojo engine was a way to use improve results by tracking which links were selected for each query.
• Exploration and recommendations. Users can explore tags, URLs, users and their visited results. For each search they see weighted recommendations (”People who searched for ‘celiac disease’ also searched for…”) and recommended links based on others’ searches.
• Ad hoc social networks. The community aspects of Shreveport were completely ad hoc, based only on search terms. No adding people as contacts or joining networks. Clearly this feature works better for populations with a strong shared vocabulary…
• Presence. The original Shreveport concept incorporated presence to encourage direct interaction between users.

More on Gene post Search Tagging.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 10th, 2005 at 5:50 pm and is filed under Information Architecture, Methodologies, External Articles, Gene Smith. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.