My tagged search experiment: TagBulb & Las Fallas
Before starting on tagging today, I’d suggest that you take a quick read of an article from Inc.com - Not Only the Lonely Become Entrepreneurs. Depending on whether you consider yourself an introvert or an extrovert, the article can be really funny, right on the mark, or both.
Last month, I wrote three blog entires about tags - tagged search, power of tags, and tags + APIs (application programming interfaces). Technology can be a great equalizer for small businesses. Tags come into play in terms of finding, using, and presenting user tagged content - instead of relying on the black box of Google Page Rank and other old school measures of perceived popularity or usefulness.
I enjoy rolling up my sleeves and getting dirty. What better way to explore the state of tagged search than to configure and implement tagged search using TagBulb - one of the new, hungry players in the tagged search marketspace? On its website, TagBulb lets you search (as of today) the tags from 30 different content and merchant sites: Flickr, Amazon, Technorati, Yahoo, 43Things, del.icio.us, and more.
TagBulb is delivering three benefits:
(1) TagBulb is taking the open APIs from content and merchant sites - and integrating them into its search capabilities as fast as possible. Most of us don’t want to learn how to use APIs and also don’t want to deal with any technical quirks (bugs) related to implementing newly released APIs.
(2) TagBulb takes the results and displays them in a reasonable attractive and easy-to-navigate interface. After entering your tagged search term, you select the type of content you want to see (for example, video, audio, or blog) and the site from which you want to view content (for example, flickr).
(3) Like Google Custom Search (at Google Co-op) - which does not support tagged search right now, TagBulb lets you configure your own TagBulb Custom Search Engine (CSE) to create your own search engine. You pick what gets searched. You can then take some relatively untechie code to install the custom search engine.
For my on-going experiment, I created a TagBulb CSE about the annual, month-long Las Fallas festival in Valencia, Spain. Take a look at Las Fallas Valencia to see the results. (Bear in mind that I used a redirect from my URL to the TagBulb site. This is a slightly kludgy way to do it, as opposed to implementing the code on my site. For my experiment, this will work just fine.)
Las Fallas is coming up soon - in March - so there should be lots of new content. I already knew that there were many entertaining photos, videos, and blogs on the web tagged for Las Fallas. Configuring the CSE takes seconds, including you having the option of providing your Google AdSense ID - so that you can make money off the CSE when users click on the contextual ads.
I changed the search term from “Las Fallas” to “Fallas” because the results seemed to be slightly better. You need to expect that you’ll have to play with search terms in order to achieve optimal results. For my experiment, I left all of the tabs (categories) visible so that you can see what is available, even though some tabs (for example, jobs) are not relevant to my topic.
I have contacted TagBulb a few times to provide feedback and obtain insight regarding their development roadmap. TagBulb has been very responsive.
TagBulb Strengths
* TagBulb has grown the number of content and merchant sites it searches by 50 percent over the past month.
* Even someone who does not understand a lot about search engines can use TagBulb and obtain great results.
* If you setup a TagBulb CSE, you can capture 100 percent of the Google AdSense revenue.
* You can easily select which tag tabs (categories) to show or hide depending on your preferences and needs. You can also pick which tag to show as the default tag. (For Las Fallas Valencia, it was a toss-up between photos and videos.)
TagBulb Opportunities
* Photos and videos link to the content itself - such as showing only the photo - rather than the entire page (on flickr, for example) that show more information about the content. (TagBulb reports this is on their “to do” list.)
* It would be nice to have a way to toggle back and forth between traditional search results (maybe Google CSE?) and tagged search results for comparison and research purposes. Then again, you could always use Google if you wanted to use Google.
* While this is not TagBulb’s doing, the tags for Amazon books and products are terrible. As you can see, the results are barely relevant. Unfortunately for you and TagBulb, you would obtain the same results by searching Amazon tags on the Amazon.com website. That is something for Amazon to think about - with its customers who create the tags.
So far, the experiment of Las Fallas Search using TagBulb has been fun and interesting.
Have you used TagBulb or a comparable application? What are your thoughts? Please post your observations on my blog.
All is well.
