Google Introduces Four New Products - Google Co-op
(Page 4 of 4 )
But it’s Google Co-op beta (http://www.google.com/coop) that should help convince the skeptics that Google really gets Web 2.0. “We’re going to take the Tom Sawyer view and see how our users paint the fence,” commented Mayer. The new service is designed to let businesses, organizations, and individuals share their knowledge by labeling web pages that relate to their areas of expertise. Users can subscribe to another user’s content, labels, and links; these then get added to the subscribing user’s search results when they put in relevant queries. So a subscriber to labels and links from the Centers for Disease Control, for example, could expect to get some really in-depth content when he or she searched on, say, “recent epidemics.”
Or to take an example similar to one that Google itself used, a doctor could tag particular pages relating to his area of expertise. A patient could then subscribe to the doctor’s information, allowing the two to become even closer collaborators in keeping the patient healthy. Reaching beyond this, if a doctor is too busy to take on more patients, or has a widespread reputation for being the best in his particular specialty, someone who is not a patient of his but suffering from an illness he is known to treat can subscribe to his links and still benefit from his expertise.
Google has already started working with partners to annotate web pages related to health and city guides. The search engine hopes that the broader online community will help build out new topic areas. Users that want to subscribe to content can do so by visiting http://www.google.com/directory. The new service is available on all English language Google domains including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.
The service sounds reminiscent of most of the other tagged search engines I’ve heard of and tried before. I’m particularly concerned with how Google plans to make sure that anyone who claims to be an expert in a particular area really is an expert in that area. But it will certainly be interesting to see what is built up from this beginning; Google has already signed on the Centers for Disease Control, the Mayo Clinic and Kaiser Permanente to provide health data. That sounds like a good start.
| DISCLAIMER: The content provided in this article is not warranted or guaranteed by Developer Shed, Inc. The content provided is intended for entertainment and/or educational purposes in order to introduce to the reader key ideas, concepts, and/or product reviews. As such it is incumbent upon the reader to employ real-world tactics for security and implementation of best practices. We are not liable for any negative consequences that may result from implementing any information covered in our articles or tutorials. If this is a hardware review, it is not recommended to open and/or modify your hardware. |
