Is social book marking going to gain in popularity to rival organic searches? I doubt it.

For those of you who don’t know about Tagging or Social Bookmarking I will try to explain the concept. Basically what happens is people go to a site like Del.icio.us that allows them to write a little tag line about the pages that they bookmark and it saves their bookmarks for them. When enough people bookmark the same sites these bookmarked sites rise to the top of the membership search site.

OK, perhaps that was too simple an explanation. If you want to read up on the concept in more detail, click on this Wikipedia link to go to their explanation on the subject.

Assuming that you now have a better understanding on the subject I offer my thinking on why I feel that tagging wont replace organic searches. The results would be too easy to manipulate. What is stopping some company from paying a host of underpaid employees to go to sites like Del.icio.us and bookmarking their targeted sites? Nothing – that’s what!

I have been hearing rumors that since Yahoo acquired Del.icio.us; Yahoo may be going down that road for their search technologies. While it may be true that Yahoo has lost focus on the search market I can not believe that they would be trying to get back into the search market by replacing their directory services with tagging or social bookmarking. I mean after all – it is better to remain a solid #2 than that other solid number that gets usually gets flushed down with the toilet water.