Users of del.icio.us are already familiar with the concept of “tagging” websites with keywords for their own retrieval, and for the perusal of others. When you tag a site in del.icio.us, you see how many other users have done the same and what “keywords” they’re using to tag it with. On a macroscopic level, sites like del.icio.us effectively map the Internet, in terms of site popularity and define it in the language of the user.
Google has released two new (beta) products that further the move towards mapping the subject matter of the net in terms of what surfers are looking for, and finding relevant.
Today the company announced a grab bag of new services and updated products: Google Co-op Beta; a community-based tagging system where users can label web pages for relevance; Google Desktop 4 Beta, an improved version of their indexed file searching tool; and Google Trends, a statistical analysis page that shows how often search terms are being used and in what geographical locations.
Read this article from Ars Technica
