Yahoo! Acquires Del.icio.us Tagging Site

Yahoo!, which already owns the shared tagging site Flickr has acquired del.icio.us, according to Search Engine Watch blog. Del.icio.us now has 300,000 subscribers.

What are they going to call it? How bout Yah.lic.ious!

Tagging allows the creator of information to assign it to categories under which it can be found. Flcikr and Del.icio.us allow tags to be kept private, shared with friends or open the general public.

Joshua Schachter, del.icio.us founder writes on his blog "Together we'll continue to improve how people discover, remember and share on the Internet, with a big emphasis on the power of community." He refers to Flickr as "our fraternal twin. Actually, Flickr is for tagging images and del.icio.us allows tagging a textual document which might contain an image.

Microsoft recently received a patent in this area.

In their version, "the system automatically annotates the objects with semantically relevant keywords and/or updates associations between the keywords and objects. As the retrieval-feedback-annotation cycle is repeated, the annotation coverage and accuracy of future searches continues to improve."

Strengthening Search, Yahoo's Core Capability, is Smart Strategy
Tagging helps to make information more manageable and accessible. Since we are all drowning in information, this acquisition shows that Yahoo! is focused on its core capability - search. Do that really, really, really well in the information age, and Google's pitch for world domination -- and distraction from its core strength -- could lead to naught.

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