Internet and Businesses Articles

Social Bookmarking

A social bookmarking site is a website where many users can manage their own private bookmarks and share their favorite websites or web pages with a community of users. Del.icio.us, the most popular social bookmarking site, boosts over 3 millions of users. The early social bookmarking site itlist.com was launched in 1996, but the trend of socal bookmarking won’t make the waves till 10 years later.

Many web surfers have hundreds or even thousands of items on their bookmark list. They often have hard time to find the items they’ve bookmarked and the idea of an online tool as such bookmark sites are born naturally to help millions of users to better organize their favorite web pages. A social bookmark site does more than that by allowing users to share their favorites with each other.

How Search Engine Rank Web Pages

All major search engines rank web pages by quality score and relevance score. The quality scores are calculated by the links from other page since the search engines don’t know how to evaluate page content. The relevance score is calculated by both on-page content and the page content that link to the page. The idea is simple. A link from page A to page B is a vote to page B even though there’s no way to know that vote is “for” or “against” page A. The number of links to a page is a good measure of popularity of that page. Assuming we naturally ignore bad pages, link popularity is a good measure of page quality. The problem with current search engines’ ranking algorithms is that majority of web users don’t know how to or don’t want to create web pages. Even for those who’ve created hundreds of pages, they spend 99% of their time on quality of page content which the search engines will never know or figure it out unless you have a lot of links pointing to that page. They have no interests creating links to whatever good or bad pages. The web surfers of 2007 won’t get excited by any sites they found (which was true in 1997). The idea of measure page quality by links is based on the observation of user behaviors ten years ago.

Search Engines Meet Social Bookmarks

If someone has the ability to collect bookmark files from all hundreds of millions of web users and process the billions of links in all bookmark files, the rankings of web pages derived from the bookmarks would be a more accurate representation of votes to the web pages. Of course, this would never happen. The closest thing to this scenario is the links on social bookmarking sites. Three million users on Del.icio.us is a statistically significant sampling of the entire web user universe which is estimated at a few hundred millions. It is reasonable to think that major search engines do consider links on social bookmarking sites a very important factor in their ranking algorithm at least while ranking pages for very popular keywords.

Bruce Zhang writes about business and technology. A social bookmarking(http://ma.gnolia.com/people/longago/bookmarks/) site is a website where many users can manage their own private bookmarks and share their favorite websites or web pages with a community of users. Del.icio.us, the most popular social bookmarking site, boosts over 3 millions of users. The early social bookmarking site itlist.com was launched in 1996, but the trend of socal bookmarking won’t make the waves till 10 years later.