Meta-Search by Tag or Site URL

Sometimes I'm looking for certain kinds of sites. I might, for example, want to find several sites about soutwestern curling leagues. There are lots of tricks for doing this, including finding a relevant site and deconstructing who links to it, tracking down the same site in searchable subject indexes and then seeing who else is listed with it, and some full-text search engine tricks. Now there's yet another method I can add to my toolbox: Tagground.

Tagground, at http://www.tagground.com/, is in beta. Currently it searches a variety of tagging sites, including digg, del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia, and RawSugar. You can search Tagground by tag but the cool thing is to search by URL. That way you can see where a particular site is being tagged and better, what words it's being tagged with.

Say I'm interested in home improvement and I want to get a sense of how people tag home improvement sites, so I can get some inspiration when searching for them. I decide to search for AskTheBuilder.com. (Searching for www.askthebuilder.com and askthebuilder.com will get you two entirely different lists of results, so try both. And don't use the http:// prefix on the URL because you will make Tagground burp.)

I get 45 results. The results include the word with which the URL is tagged and icons to represent where the tag was found (most of the ones I looked at were from Del.) Clicking on the icon underneath the search result will take you to a tag search results page for that resource, where you can resume your exploring.

Now here's where Tagground gets a little wonky. When you click on a tag itself, I suppose it should do a Tagground search for that tag and find the URLs that link to it. Many times that worked. But with some tags (like HomeImprovement) I got either no results, or an error message. I can't isolate exactly what seems to be causing the problem, but be careful with multiple-word tags.

In the case that you do get a tag search to give you results, you'll get a list of resources marked with that tag. The title of the resource is hyperlinked to Tagground; to actually get to the resource you'll need to use the icon to the right of the title (this is a little annoying.) Underneath that there's a row of icons to denote the site(s) from which the resource came. (When I tried this search the resources came from all over the place.)

The fact that sometimes Tagground would respond to a tag search with an error slowed me down a bit, but I like the idea of searching for the tags associated with a URL and then change perspective and search for URLs by a particular tag. As many tags are general an option to filter results would be nice (search for tag x, filter results by tag y, filter again by tag z, etc.) There's a roadmap of expected improvements available as well as a blog.

Update:: Tagground has already fixed some of my complaints and responded to others. Dude! Thanks Tagground!

Posted to Internet-Technology-Tagging