GiveALink.org

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

GiveALink is a website where people can donate their bookmarks to the Web community. It is different from most other social bookmarking tools, like Del.icio.us and BlinkList, in that GiveALink is not a commercial site. It is an academic research project, started at Indiana University, Bloomington, with the goal to analyze the structure and content of bookmark files in order to build a new generation of Web mining techniques and new ways to search, recommend, surf, personalize and visualize the Web.

GiveALink provides a variety of useful services not available elsewhere. One is a search engine which, given a URL, finds other Web pages that people bookmark together with it (i.e. similar Web pages). The search engine also supports keyword search and the results can be personalized based on the user's submitted bookmark files. In addition, users can view, organize, augment their bookmarks online, as well as download their bookmark files to several computers.

All of the (anonymized) data at GiveALink is available online to other researchers and Internet users. You can download the URL collection, matrix containing similarity values for pairs of URLs, and the output from several ranking algorithms. Search results can be obtained in XML format through an RSS feed, to help you integrate them into your own applications.

At GiveALink, you do not have to go through the extra trouble of tagging your bookmarks in order to be able to search through them. GiveALink leverages the existing hierarchical structure in bookmark files (folders and subfolders), as well as collaborative filtering techniques, to measure similarity between Web pages. Basically, if many people put two URLs in the same folder in their bookmarks, then these two URLs must be similar. On the other hand, if most people put the two URLs in different folders, then they must be different from each other. To learn more about this semantic similarity measure, ranking algorithms, and other applications available at GiveALink.org, refer to the paper linked below.