Google Press Day 2006 and Google Co-op
Matt Cutts has done a nice write up of Google’s Press Day, including a lot of the Q&A.
One thing that caught my eye is Google Co-op. It appears to be Google’s take on expert/topic/vertical search. The principle is that you subscribe to a topic and you tag your results. Their ‘tag’ is known as a ‘label’ and an ‘annotation’ is matching a label to a web page or set of web pages. People can then subscribe to you to see your tagging for a given topic. Rather than having to find the best taggers yourself, there is a directory that finds them for you. Who is a ‘good’ tagger and hence gets displayed in the directory is automated rather than having manual editors. It’ll be interesting to see how this type of vertical search works out compared to systems such as Swicki, who rely on personalisation a lot more than just bulk tagging.
