Google Co-Op Topics - Annotating Web Content
In May of 2006, among other announcements, Google announced Google Co-op. This article is a follow-on article to a previous article, "Google Co-Op Overview", which provided a high-level overview of Google Co-op. This article will go into one of the components of Google Co-Op, Topics, in more detail than was covered in the previous article.Google Co-Op is important to users for several reasons. Google Co-Op allows users to contribute information that will help Google to improve search results for everyone. In addition, Google Co-Op allows an end-user to customize their own search experience so that information that is more relevant and trusted will appear at the top of the user's search results. Users accomplish this by subscribing to "trusted" sources of information. Information from those trusted sources will appear at the top of a user's search results for relevant searches.Google Co-Op is a beta-test service now being offered by Google. Anyone with a Google account may participate. While still in its infancy, Google Co-Op represents Google's efforts to embrace social web and social search concepts in a major way to help improve Google search results. Google Co-op consists of two things:1. Topics, which are simply a means of labeling web content2. Subscribed links, which are a means for users to subscribe to a particular web site's contentTopics can further be sub-divided into two things:1. The ability to create an entire categorization or labeling scheme2. The ability to simply provide labels for web content, which Google calls annotationsThe remainder of this article will focus on the annotations aspect of Google Topics.Annotations to URLsAnnotating URLs is perhaps the easiest part of Google Co-Op to understand. It also requires the least amount of technical expertise to implement. A "topic" is simply Google's way of saying "area of interest". Topics are a labeling or categorization scheme. Topics allow users a way of providing labels (which may also be referred to as tags, or categories) for information on the web (represented by URLs). Labels may be provided for an entire web site, portions of a web site, or even a specific web page. These "labels" provide some indication of the topic or topics for a given web site or page. In essence, they provide additional information on what the web site is all about.Anyone with a Google account can label web sites. Google refers to the process of providing labels for web sites as "Annotating URLs". An annotation is simply the association of a label, or multiple labels, with a URL. For example, a travel site might get the label "destination_guide".Users may use labels for topics that Google already has under development, which include: health, destination guides, autos, computer
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