Can Social Bookmarking Improve Web Search?

Can Social Bookmarking Improve Web Search?. This is something that I discuss on most of the courses that I run nowadays - if you want to get a different view of search results, don't rely on traditional algorithm-led search engines.  Instead, start looking at the  results produced by (shock horror!) real live human beings. Now, I don't mean the social  search engines,  as I'm still far from convinced about their  value,  but instead, think about using something like delicious. 

Did you know that you can type in a URL such as http://del.icio.us/tag/librarians and get a listing of pages that have been tagged with that term? If you want more terms, just whack in a + between each word like+this and you'll get some useful stuff. It'll be useful because when people tag pages they want to remember them, so the pages and tags will pretty well relate well to each other.

Anyway, I'm pleased to see that some work has been done in this area by Paul Heymann et al for a conference paper. I've not been able to read the entire thing, but the abstract is very useful:
"Social bookmarking is a recent phenomenon which has the potential to give us a great deal of data about pages on the web. One major question is whether that data can be used to augment systems like web search. To answer this question, over the past year we have gathered what we believe to be the largest dataset from a social bookmarking site yet analyzed by academic researchers. Our dataset represents about forty million bookmarks from the social bookmarking site del.icio.us. We contribute a characterization of posts to del.icio.us: how many bookmarks exist (about 115 million), how fast is it growing, and how active are the URLs being posted about (quite active). We also contribute a characterization of tags used by bookmarkers. We found that certain tags tend to gravitate towards certain domains, and vice versa. We also found that tags occur in over 50 percent of the pages that they annotate, and in only 20 percent of cases do they not occur in the page text, backlink page text, or forward link page text of the pages they annotate. We conclude that social bookmarking can provide search data not currently provided by other sources, though it may currently lack the size and distribution of tags necessary to make a significant impact."

My emphasis there of course, and I'd certainly agree with their findings.