Search guru Danny Sullivan is dubious that tagging will be the great savior for search. Like others, he says that controlled tagging - in the form of directory categorization - has already been prone to spamming at places like the Open Directory.
Wide-open tagging, where anyone can get their pages to the top of a list just by labeling it so, is going to be a giant spam magnet.
OK, that's fair. So my question for Danny is, why did Yahoo buy Flickr? Somehow I gotta believe they were intrigued by the site's tagging features. I can see Yahoo mashing up Flickr and Y!Q into a powerful image search tool that not only includes results from the Web but also a distinct column of user-generated images that have the same keyword. Conceptually this might look like what Technorati is already doing or even A9 Opensearch.
