Foxmarks: entering (human) search

Posted on | June 26, 2007 |

Mitch Kapor’s (inventor of Lotus 1-2-3, co-founder of the EFF) bookmark-synchronizing utility for Firefox-based browsers, foxmarks, is about to enter the market of human-powered search engines - a space currently heating up - not only since the recent launch of Mahalo. the search engine will utilize user-generated metadata on URLs to deliver - according to TechCrunch - superior search-results compared to Google - especially for popular search-terms, which naturally suffer the most under SEO-efforts. thinking about foxmarks, three questions arise:

• there are obviously privacy issues when using user-submitted data for a public search-offering (update: the foxmarks-Blog promises to give users the ability to opt-out before they’re going to launch a public service)
• when is Yahoo! going to leverage del.icio.us in a similar way? given that del.icio.us has far more users than foxmarks (I’m guessing) this seems to be a no-brainer…
• how is foxmarks going to protect their service, which might work very well while it has not appeared on SEO’s radars, from spammers?

update: after reading that Yahoo! just integrated Flickr’s image search-results (which is superior to the image search at Google or Ask, at least according to Zooomr CEO Thomas Hawk) tightly into their main Yahoo! Image Search product, a possible adaption of del.icio.us-metadata to the Yahoo!-searchengine does sound even more interesting…doesn’t it?

 

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