TechCrunch reports today that Mitch Kapor’s Foxmarks will become a search engine, and that it wowed everyone at foo camp.
All search engines need algorithms for ranking pages. Google ranks pages based on links from other pages. Foxmarks will instead look at links in bookmarks.
No search engine has done this before, so it seems quite natural that their is a “wow” factor to the results. They’ve found an unpolluted spring, a fount of trustworthy metadata. That’s the way HTML links were back in 1996. That’s before there was money to be made from having the right constellation of links pointing to your site.
This is not the first time a search engine has been created using bookmarks. I wrote this in 2005 about Zniff:
A new search engine, Zniff, takes a step in the right direction by using publicly available social bookmarks as indicators of worth. Paradoxically, this approach is doomed to fail if it enjoys any success. If it becomes popular, it would be all to easy for tricksters to create false bookmarks for the sole purpose of inflating the ranks of chosen pages. It’s the same lesson that Google is learning now with googlebombing: You can never trust random pages on the internet. Not even social bookmark pages.
I sure was surly back then!
How solid is the “doomed to fail if it enjoys any success” principle? Even though links are no longer so trustworthy, Google still serves up good results. Will Foxmarks be able to continue wowing people once the SEO bad guys start making fake bookmarks?