Idea: Tags as a Way to Add Context to a Search
Today I was reading a Seattle Times article about search and I ran across this quote:
See how long it takes to find the top five university marine-biology programs, or the store with the cheapest tires in Seattle. You searched for java, but did you mean coffee, the island or the programming language?
Nothing revolutionary, but it got me thinking. What if you added tags to search to add that kind of context that’s missing? Say you search for “Java,” then when you get your results on the right side of the page are tabs with the most popular tags for the pages you returned (minus the most popular, which would most likely be your search term). Say the top tag is “programming,” followed by “language” and then “coffee” (I just totally made that up). Now, if you click one of those tabs you can filter the results to only see those pages with the term “java” and the tag “coffee.” That means the results should be a lot more accurate.
I’m sure someone has come up with this, but when I thought of it this morning I felt pretty smart. Thoughts?