From Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 and back -: how did your grandma use to tag?

ABSTRACTWe consider the applicability of terms extracted from anchortext as a source of Web page descriptions in the form of tags. With a relatively simple and easy-to-use method, we show that anchortext significantly overlaps with tags obtained from the popular tagging portal del.icio.us. Considering the size and diversity of the user community potentially involved in social tagging, this observation is rather surprising. Furthermore, we show by an evaluation using human-created relevance assessments the general suitability of the anchortext tag generation in terms of user-perceived precision values. The awareness of this easy-to-obtain source of tags could trigger the rise of new tagging portals pushed by this automatic bootstrapping process or be applied in already existing portals to increase the number of tags per page by merely looking at the anchortext which exists anyway.