Looking up the word "tiger" on Virgilio (or other search engines :) you get a list of results throws together sites about the professional golfer Tiger Woods, the Mac OS X operating system, or the last Java 2 Platform Standard Edition (J2SE) 1.5 —code named "Tiger". In order to force a context , you can refine the search appending a further word, e.g. "tiger golf", "tiger apple" or "tiger java". Anyway, you probably have to sift through pages of irrilevant results to find what you want.
A different approach to avoid such a confusion is let users categorize their Web resources (link, photos, ...) by category, title, interest ... using a tag.
This is the approach of del.icio.us, the Web site opened at the end of 2003 by the 30-years-old New Yorker software programmer Joshua Schachter. With del.icio.us people are able to tag any link they choose for easy retrival later and to share easily with other people. Today more than 85,000 people are using the free service. I tried the service finding Web resources about Ajax, a new rising Web Technology and I have been very impressed. Comparison with traditional search engines is even not practicable for this topic.
Other interesting examples are Technorati.com and Flickr.com. The latter, a year-old photo-sharing service, has been bought by the giant Yahoo! Inc for an undisclosed sum in March with its 420,000 subscribers, while the former, a blog index, offers a set of interesting services such as a pluggable searchlet for searching information inside blogs (as this :).
