Can social bookmarking improve web search?

Abstract

Social bookmarking is a recent phenomenon which has the potential to give us a great deal of data about pages on the web. One major question is whether that data can be used to augment systems like web search. To answer this question, over the past year we have gathered what we believe to be the largest dataset from a social bookmarking site yet analyzed by academic researchers. Our dataset represents about forty million bookmarks from the social bookmarking site del.icio.us. We contribute a characterization of posts to del.icio.us: how many bookmarks exist (about 115 million), how fast is it growing, and how active are the URLs being posted about (quite active). We also contribute a characterization of tags used by bookmarkers. We found that certain tags tend to gravitate towards certain domains, and vice versa. We also found that tags occur in over 50 percent of the pages that they annotate, and in only 20 percent of cases do they not occur in the page text, backlink page text, or forward link page text of the pages they annotate. We conclude that social bookmarking can provide search data not currently provided by other sources, though it may currently lack the size and distribution of tags necessary to make a significant impact.

Neighborhood-Based Tag Prediction

“…[14] investigate the overlap between anchortext and tags for a Web page. [9] present an in-depth analysis of the del.icio.us tagging portal and conclude that the data contained in tagging portals represents valuable information which could enhance the performance of search engines. A similar conclusion is drawn by Yanbe et al [24] who also investigate the possibility of a hybrid search approach, based both on PageRank and on social annotations.…”

Supporting the Creation of Scholarly Bibliographies by Communities through Online Reputation Based Social Collaboration

“…It provides authentication and access control features. Heymann, et al [8], concluded that social bookmarking can provide search data not currently provided by other sources, though it may currently lack the size and distribution of tags necessary to make a significant impact. Santos-Neto, et al [7], showed that the current level of collaboration in CiteULike and Connotea is consistently low.…”

Are Tags from Mars and Descriptors from Venus? A Study on the Ecology of Educational Resource Metadata

“…Vander Wal [2] observed that tagging could be used to compensate for missing terms in a taxonomy and Lin et al [3] and Al-Khalifa et al [4] explored the overlap of tags with controlled vocabularies and automatic indexing. Sen et al have studied the quality of tags and tagclouds in [5], Farooq et al [6] focus on folksonomies adding intellectual value to a tagging system, whereas Heymann et al [7] observe that tags are present in the page text of 50% of annotated pages and in 16% of the titles.…”