Overture/Yahoo should present and market sponsored search as a kind of tag folksonomy.
There’s been a lot of press about the tagging folksonomies engendered by flickr and del.icio.us, and with good reason. It’s difficult (maybe impossible) to create useful top-down taxonomies which everyone agrees with and that tracks changes in human knowledge, as both yahoo and dmoz have discovered. (Didn’t a few notables of the Royal Society start thinking about this around the 1680’s? :-)
Tagging things is good. Let interested people do the work of organizing a set of data. Sure, they’ll disagree or have overlap, but big deal. In aggregate the utility outweighs the inefficiency. Humans like to label, let ’em.
And you know what? This is the exact conclusion we came to back in 1998 with GoTo (now Overture, part of Yahoo). Let website owners tag their own websites with the keywords they feel concisely and accurately describe their sites. We thought of this as a type of ‘search’, but it really is the same thing as what these other tagging systems do. GoTo was never a normal search engine, with indices and such, but instead started out and still is a tagging engine.
GoTo/Overture was never a search engine, it was a big tagging system for URLs. The only real difference between it and del.icio.us is you paid per click to get listed.
To make tagging work, you need three things: a large dataset, a large user base (on the same order as the dataset), and a reason to keep these users interested in doing the work of tagging. If your system works, you’ll find the dataset grows to be 10x-100x larger than the user base as the users put in more and more data.
In Flickr the dataset is pictures with the tags being descriptive of image content or composition. The user interest is the same thing that makes us take pictures of ourselves and our loved ones, do vanity searches for ourselves or friends, and whatever drives bloggers to blog.
In del.icio.us, the dataset is bookmarks with the tags being descriptive of the personal meaning of the site to a user. The user interest is partially the desire for a platform-/browser-independent bookmark mechanism and partially to see what other sites people have marked similarly.
In GoTo’s/Overture’s sponsored search, the dataset is websites owned by people offering products/services, the tags being descriptive summaries of the products/services offered. The interest on the part of advertisers is the desire to get good targeted leads into their site. The interest on the part of the users is the desire to see many sites with the same tag (keyword) so they can comparison shop.
If Yahoo/Overture were bright, they could fairly trivially recast the current interfaces offered users and ‘advertisers’ (as they call these website owners) to use the ideas gleened from these other tagging applications. It wouldn’t take much and would only really require a bit of a PR makeover. Unlike existing folksonomies, the GoTo/Overture one benefits from having a cascaded matching system, where if the exact tag you’re looking for isn’t found, it’ll try to find the next best thing. This sort of power is unheard of in the tagging area and Yahoo/Overture could really benefit by highlighting that capability.
And to me such a change would be so much more important than all this stupid contextual advertising focus that all the search companies are slobbering over. Just do tfidf on the page/site, use that as the tag for above and be done with it.