ResearchBuzz

So I came across this search engine for tag sites, and most of it was eh, okay, but there was one feature I found about it that was really interesting, but it didn’t even have anything to do with the search itself. So the question is, do I cover the site in ResearchBuzz?

The answer is apparently yes. Tagvy, at http://www.tagvy.com , metasearches a few different tag resources. Enter a query and you’ll get search results in different colored blocks down the page — Flickr, Technorati, Del.icio.us, and Google News. (When I tested it Technorati was temporarily unavailable.) Tagvy calls this a tagball. The different colored blocks makes for easy nav, but this is a fairly limited set of results for a tag search — there are far more resources out there.

Now on to the bit I found interesting. To the left of the results page is a AdSense ad block, which is cool. The background of the ad is a repeated photos of goats. I’m not sure what the point of having background photos to an ad block is unless maybe it helps clickthrough.

Tagvy has a FAQ underneath the ad block that explains various things about Tagvy, including information about various “tagballs”. But Tagvy also explains how to change the image behind the ad block, which made me get fascinated with it again.

I mean, look: Tagvy is searching Flickr anyway. Why not pull the URL of the first result from Flickr and use that image as the ad background? Then the search results, the ad, and the images behind the ad would all match, instead of seeing goats behind a search for Motorola.

If you want a quick search result from a few major sources (Tagvy was very fast) it’s worth a look. But those expecting results from scads and scads of resources will be disappointed.

Amazing but oh-so-annoying to spell tag site del.icio.us ( http://del.icio.us ) has announced a couple of new features.

First one is The Network Badge, which allows you to put notes about your del.icio.us network on your site. You can get more information about it if you log in; otherwise when you go to http://del.icio.us/help/networkbadges you won’t get anything (can’t you at least show some samples on that page?)

Anyway, this is basically what it looks like:

You can also choose to list the number of people in your network and the number of fans that you have along with a link to your bookmarks. You can also change the icon a little bit, but that’s about it.

In addition to this new badge Del is also offering a way to see the most active users for a particular tag. If you go to a page for an active tag ( http://del.icio.us/tag/google ), you’ll see one the right side of the page not only related tags, but also users who are active for the tag for which you’re searching. An interesting way to get another angle on finding similar bookmarks, via active tag users.