Tagging Not Likely The Killer Solution For Search

In case you've missed it, there's been an explosion of interest in "tagging," the idea that if everyone labels photos, blogs and so on, we'll more easily be able to find what we're looking for. But all the interest (dare I say hype) is largely ignoring the fact that we've had tagging on the web for going on 10 years, and the experience on the search side is that it can't be trusted.

The meta keywords tag has been around for nearly a decade. The idea behind it in part was that people could use the tag to classify what their pages are about, as well as provide copy that search engines could index if the relevant text for some reason couldn't fit on the page itself.

Last I surveyed, Google still didn't support it. Yahoo did; Ask Jeeves said they did so "unofficially," meaning they might not tomorrow. MSN doesn't, to my current knowledge. (Via Search Engine Watch)