This website covers knowledge management, personal effectiveness, theory of constraints, amongst other topics. Opinions expressed here are strictly those of the owner, Jack Vinson, and those of the commenters.

Question: do search engines look at tags

Tagging is interesting and fun, and people have been talking about it for a while.  There is, of course, the term folksonomy that was created to compare to taxonomy.

One of the advantages of tags is that they should help inform a search.  If I search for XYZ, I should be able to find documents that contain that phrase, that contain links with that phrase in the title, AND that are tagged with that phrase.

I know that Technorati tag search does this explicitly across blogs, photos, video, and music with tags applied directly to the content.  And I would expect search engines to be able to find these.  But what about tags that have been linked to a page, such as through del.icio.us or Ma.gnolia, where that term doesn't appear on the page.

So here is the question.  Specifically, will the search highlight pages that have been tagged with a term that doesn't otherwise appear on the page?  (Google does return results on del.icio.us with unusual tag terms.  But I don't know if it improves the connection to the original pages.)

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