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I read an interesting post by Jeff Clavier the other day and have been wondering about how an implicit search context, such as that used by Wink, could work for or against you. Btw I also still get a JavaScript error on the Wink homepage when I try to click on the search box .

I have posted on various issues regarding tag based search before and there was good discussion on a recent(ish) post by Om Malik entitled People Power vs Google. The new problem I envision is that when you are searching for something that is syntactically the same but semantically different from concepts which you or other people have tagged, then the results will be skewed in the wrong direction. It is a very good idea on Wink’s part to put Google search results on the same page.

Of course this problem can be overcome with a little work by the searcher who can make a more exact search string; however, one could then argue that if you have to make a more exact search string to find things outside of your tagospehere then why bother when it is likely that Google searching (ie not using tags) in your area of interest will generally return the results you want with or without tags. The same is generally true with using del.icio.us in that it is faster to go and search on Google than to find what you are looking for on del.icio.us.

It is interesting to think about the problem in terms of information theory. When you encode the western alphabet for transmission like using Morse code, one would usually want to devote as few bits as possible to the letters “e” and “s” because they have a high degree of redundancy. Tag supported search is similar, in that it reduces the number of tags needed to find frequently accessed information (like reducing the number of bits that represent the letter “e”) by leveraging the work that people have put into tagging pages. This can also backfire of course when you are looking for AJAX the football club rather than AJAX the wicked-awesome programming technique when most of the pages you tag with AJAX are those relating to the technology. The user essentially has to climb out of this “context pit” created by their tagging habits by specifying “AJAX amsterdam” or “AJAX football”. Really it all depends on your search habits.

I am not sure we can prevent this problem when searching for obscure or syntactically different topics. While this might be a slightly larger problem with tag based searching it can also be a problem with Google - the main difference being that Google bases its results on actual HTML links between pages, which, in my opinion, should generally result in a more robust and less biased result set. Will this problem become even worse once we start using things like the Semantic Web?