Guten Tag World

When I started coding the site, I thought it will be a place to have both Technorati and Delicious on the same screen, and on the same RSS feed. Early adopters saw that, it was even the first site to offer a public feed for Technorati tags.

Did I lose you already ? If you don't know what a tag is, clutch on, we'll come back to that in a minute. Meanwhile, replace "tags" by "qualifiers".

Why was it important to me ? Because Technorati and Delicious were the two sides of the same mountain. Technorati let you see the tags that the editor stamp on his post (producer's tag), and Delicious let you see the tags that the visitors stamp on the editor's post (consumer's tag). I thought it might be interesting to have both in the same place ! (Might be even more interesting to correlate them, but that's another story).

So that's how it began, before I realized that lots of Web2.0 sites were beginning using tags (Flickr being the first shot). As tags are keywords that qualify content, and are chosen by humans (not robots), I thought it might be a good idea to see what a human generated ontology (sorry for those horrible terms) could give, in particular compared to what full-text crawlers do.

If I search for tag "Ajax" in Guten Tag, I will get all contents that either editors or visitors thought was related to the subject Ajax. If I search for "Ajax" in Google, I will get all contents that include the keyword Ajax. Notice the difference between "subject" and "keyword" ? A subject is a domain of interest for people, a keyword is a string of characters for robots.

A subject of interest is a subset of all people content available on the web. In that sense, a tag is a filter, set by some people, and made for other people. Guten Tag just happen to use this filter to search for people's edited content on the web.

So when you type a "keyword" in the home page form, it's actually a subject of interest. Guten Tag will try to match that with other people center of interest on the web, to show what content was filed (or indexed) as part of this -shared- subject of interest. Guten Tag is actually extracting content from this collective filing cabinet.

Guten Tag is not really a search engine, because it doen't archive collected data for future datamining. Instead, it is providing feeds that are...fed...with new, updated content. Think of a flow here. There is this massive amount of new content on the Web, that looks like a large river. Guten Tag is the dam, where you select the filter that you want to apply to get a small part of it that fits your interests.

So I chose to rename it not as a search engine, not as a flow engine, but as a Discover Engine. Guten Tag basically allow people to discover other people work in a specific subject, marked by a tag.

That's what Guten Tag is today, and I'd be delighted to hear other definitions of the service.

Enough of that ! Just use it, and you'll know better !