Yahoo! recently announced their role in creating and supporting Common Tag, a new semantic tagging format. Yahoo! says that Common Tag makes "web content more discoverable" and enables the community to "create more useful applications for aggregating, searching, and browsing the web." Their blog post mentions that they want to accelerate the structuring of the web, which aligns with their SearchMonkey launch last year, which they said was, in part, an attempt to encourage the use of structured data on the web. This brings to mind a few questions. Why did the web need a new semantic stand [...]

Related Topics: Features: Analysis | Search Features: Tagging | Top News | Yahoo: Search Monkey

Like many before it, most recently Mahalo, Wikia Search has introduced a Firefox toolbar, called "Wikia Evolution," to expand the site's reach and engage more users in the process of adding and annotating search results. In the notes, it suggests that Google is taking a page from its community playbook: "Already, we’re the cutting edge when it comes to incorporating user feedback into our search results, so much so that Google is experimenting with eerily similar features." The new Wikia toolbar allows users to add URLs/pages to the Wikia index (from wherever they are online) and edit or [...]

Related Topics: Search Engines: Search Wikia | Search Features: Enhanced Listings | Search Features: Tagging

Microsoft's John Martin has shared a preview of the new Microsoft social bookmarking tool that will be demonstrated at the TechEd North America event in the upcoming week. John provided a shortlist of features and two screen captures of the social bookmarking tool at his blog post. Based on the limited detail I can see, the tool is not all that innovative when compared to Delicious and other social bookmarking tools out there today. It seems that you can bookmark any URL across the web then apply tags to those URLs and also save the bookmarks in the "new My Bookmarks tool." The screen sho [...]

Related Topics: Microsoft: Other Search | Search Engines: Social Search Engines | Search Features: Tagging

Yahoo Travel has redesigned and added a range of features, including personalization and new mapping tools to the site. It's also seeking to more deeply integrate travel properties FareChase (its fares and rates "meta search" engine) and Trip Planner (its user-generated content site) into Travel. Flickr is also well represented throughout the redesign. I'm not going to be able to capture every nuance or aspect of the upgrade and all the new features, but I'll highlight the main ones. The new home page displays personalized recommendations, as well as more "social features" from Trip Planner. [...]

Related Topics: Search Engines: Personalized Search Engines | Search Engines: Travel Search Engines | Search Features: Tagging | Yahoo: Flickr | Yahoo: Maps & Local

On March 3rd, Flickr turns three. Flickr is in many ways the company that helped define "Web 2.0" and was its poster child for quite some time. And Yahoo's acquisition of Flickr, in March, 2005, after only a year in existence and, even then, a longish courtship was one of the best consumer moves Yahoo's made in the past couple years. Flickr and the community mindset it brought along, not to mention tagging, have been widely integrated across numerous Yahoo properties. Here's the Business 2.0 article, "The Flickrization of Yahoo" that appeared in late 2005. Indeed, Flickr has had a "cultura [...]

Related Topics: Search Engines: Photo & Image Search | Search Features: Tagging | Stats: History | Yahoo: Flickr