Substitution or Complement: An Empirical Analysis on the Impact of Collaborative Tagging on Web Search

Recently collaborative tagging has received great attention as a public effort to create and share annotations on the Web pages. In this paper, we conducted an empirical study on how this user added descriptions associated with Web resources can be used to enhance the existing Web search paradigm. Comprehensive experiments have been performed on data collected from delicious, one of the most popular collaborative tagging Web site. Some useful conclusions on the usage of different tags have been drawn from our data analysis. Based on these insights, we proposed an innovative tag enhanced exploratory Web search framework