Why We Can't Compare Folksonomies to Search

The more I use del.icio.us and observe other folksonomies, the more I realize that we don’t use them to find “stuff”. We use them to discover “personally-related stuff”, which is really hard to do with a search engine. As I mentioned yesterday, Peter Morville’s slides from the IASummit seemed to try to compare two representative services, Google and Flickr, with the implication that folksonomies can’t Search as well as, well, Search can. (Morville compares the services on the axes of “quantity”, “quality”, and “findability”) Anyway, I think he’s absolutely right about that. Search is the best Search…

However, I think that comparing them this way is like comparing a Humvee and a Corvette on gas mileage and speed. It doesn’t really tell us everything. I think he gets the usefulness of folksonomies wrong: we don’t use them to help us Search like we do with Google.