2005 is the year that sharing user-created metadata has really hit a crescendo: links on del.icio.us, photos on Flickr, books on LibraryThing, blogs on Technorati, etc. the social web is taking off in very interesting ways. Now I ask, how will we start connecting all of these online collections in meaningful ways? Searching and getting a bunch of links based on page ranking is so last year. Search needs to get smarter, making use of all this context people are adding though tagging and other means. root.net, an interesting contextual search engine in development, provides a hint at things to come. It provides results clustered in groups: Photos from Flickr,
Websites from Yahoo! Web, Pictures from Yahoo! Images, Links from del.icio.us, and stories from Yahoo! News. Interesting, del.icio.us is the only non Yahoo! entity in the root.net search results, is this a hint of some kind? Acquisition candidate? How does this relate to Yahoo! My Web 2.0?