While browsing Google Blog, I found out about Google Co-op from the blog entry made by GOOG_DOC on Google Blog. At a glance, it may seem that Google is creating a competitor to DMOZ.

Well, not really. In short, Google Co-op is DMOZ on steroid.

On top of that, anyone can become a contributor (an equivalent of editor in DMOZ); which means more freedom for us to choose our source of information.

More on these later, let’s see how we can utilise this, shall we.

How to use Google Co-op :

1. Get a Google account. If you haven’t got one, you can register for a Gmail account. Or click here.
2. Go to Google Co-op Directory
3. Browse to the topic that interest you, and subscribe to any contributor that you feel will benefit you

That’s it ! Now whenever you’re doing search on the topic, you’ll see links from your Google Co-op subscription(s) on the top of the search results. These are links which are supposed to be highly relevant to your query.

So with Google Co-op, you may be able to find the results you’re looking for straight away; instead of looking at 1,483,552 of the results one by one.

You can also contribute to it.

I gave this a try with the “Indonesia” topic. Since it didn’t exist, I had to create the topic first. Here’s the file I submitted to Google Co-op to create the Indonesia topic :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<TopicSearchDefinition version="0.9">
<Title>Indonesia</Title>

<TopicSearchTriggers>
<DataObject id="indonesia-facts" type="facts">
<QueryName value="indonesia facts"/>
<QueryName value="indonesia data"/>
</DataObject>
<DataObject id="indonesia-news" type="news">
<QueryName value="indonesia news"/>
<QueryName value="events indonesia"/>
<QueryName value="breaking news indonesia"/>
</DataObject>
<Query>[facts]</Query>
<Query>[news]</Query>
<Query>about [facts]</Query>
<Query>learn about [facts]</Query>
<Query>teach about [facts]</Query>
</TopicSearchTriggers>
</TopicSearchDefinition>


After creating a new topic for Indonesia, now we can start submitting links on that topic :


<Annotations file="indo-anno.xml">
<Annotation about="http://thejakartapost.com/*">
<Label name="in_english"/>
<Comment>The Jakarta Post - biggest Indonesian newspaper in English</Comment>
</Annotation>

<Annotation about="http://www.zilvan.com/funnyfacts/facts_about_indonesia.htm">
<Label name="fun_facts"/>
</Annotation>
</Annotations>


As you can see, you can put a lot of information in Google Co-op, which is not possible with DMOZ. But of course they have their own strength – DMOZ is simpler to contribute to.

My profile can be viewed here.

Google Co-op is probably the Google’s implementation of the Semantic Web, the next generation of Web as envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor. Whatever it is, I found it interesting, and I’ll be keeping watch on it.

Google Co-op is an open service which require quite an effort to contribute in. As the result, there isn’t much in it as yet. But as more people found and use it, and found that you can easily annotate websites with Google Marker, then we may start seeing surprises in the future from this service.