Danny Sullivan totally misses tagging

In a recent post, Danny Sullivan goes ballistic about social tagging (such as del.icio.us) and its usefulness for improving search engines:

…we’ve had tagging on the web for going on 10 years, and the experience on the search side is that it can’t be trusted.

The meta keywords tag has been around for nearly a decade. The idea behind it in part was that people could use the tag to classify what their pages are about, as well as provide copy that search engines could index if the relevant text for some reason couldn’t fit on the page itself.

…In addition, none — NONE! — of these search engines now or ever has made use of the tag in a way to let you perhaps see all the pages "tagged" to be on a particular subject. Why not? The data is largely useless.

Mark me extremely dubious that tagging will make major inroads in improving search. And if I’m wrong, I’ll happily mea cupla. But after 10 years of tagging, the experience so far gives me good reason to be dubious.

Danny misses the whole point. Meta-tags and ‘bookmark tags’[1] like del.icio.us are totally different beasts. The difference is not, as Danny points out, the fact that meta-tags are self-provided tags and del.icio.us tags are not – that hardly matters. The huge difference is the basic underlying value proposition that each of these tagging types offers:

Meta-tags were designed primarily for exposing certain keywords to a search engine as a means for improving ranking on those keywords. That is their sole purpose and sole value. So I, as a creator of meta-tags for my site, am not ‘awarded’ for creating good meta-tags, or useful or relevant ones. I am awarded only by getting improved search rankings and increased traffic on those keywords I choose. There’s no personal value gained by writing good meta-tags… on the contrary – if everyone else is doing keyword stuffing, I may drop in ranking if I write proper meta-tags.

This underlying design of meta-tags almost incentivizes misuse and is therefore fundamentally flawed. No wonder none of the search engines use a flawed system.

Bookmark tagging solutions like del.icio.us on the other hand provide a fundamentally different value proposition. As a del.icio.us tagger, I am organizing interesting pages for myself so that I can go back to them in the future and easily find them. I am doing it for pure egoistic reasons, and I have all the reasons in the world to do a good job of it. Sure – whatever tags I put on del.icio.us may have some grander value for someone else (meme trackers, search engines, etc). But frankly I don’t really give a shit about those other uses when I’m tagging something. Therefore the underlying nature of social tagging apps (or ‘bookmark tagging’) incentivizes proper tagging[2].

Of course there could be attempts to abuse bookmark tags like del.icio.us if a significant financial incentive gets tied to their tags (in the form of using tags for search engine rankings).  But:

1. The more people use it for their own selfish reasons, the more difficult it is to abuse it. Think of this as sort of a Wikipedia… sure – some folks may try to abuse it once in a while and change entries, but the more people you have using it legitimately, the more difficult it is for abusers to misuse the system.
2. Abuse attempts are 100x easier to identify on a bookmark tagging service than they are on meta-tags or links because the usage patterns of a non-abuser (big variety of URL’s, variety of tags, etc) are so different than an abusing pattern (stuffing of specific tags on specific sites). In the meta-tag world there is hardly any such differentiation, making it extremely difficult to sort the valid from the abusive.

Saying del.icio.us tags are necessarily crap because meta-tags are, is like saying all self-published sites (aka ‘blogs’) are crap just because self-published sites on Geocities were crap 10 years ago. What’s the connection? Only the word ‘tag’ I guess… not much else.

I applaud Yahoo for foreseeing this and making one of the smartest moves in search in recent years (and I believe this was primarily a search move).

[1] The proper name for del.icio.us class applications is social bookmarking. However, for the purpose of this discussion, I think that bookmark tagging is probably a better name for these apps. While they do have a significant social aspect, the social piece has very little to do with the motivation people have in tagging on del.icio.us. The primary motivation is much more of a ‘bookmark’ motivation – ‘how can I save something so that I can easily find it later?’.

[2] I’ve quoted Joshua Porter in the past, but this applies here as well:

From now on I’m going to call this idea the “Del.icio.us Lesson”. This is the lesson that personal value precedes network value: that selfish use comes before shared use. We’re seeing it more and more everyday in services like Del.icio.us, Flickr, and is an interesting aspect of networked applications. Even though we’re definitely benefitting from the value of networked software, we’re still not doing so unless the software is valuable to us on a personal level first.