trying to understand Google Co-op

I also don't get Google Coop.

You create an account, and then you can sort of annote pages with tags by creating a complicated XML file, and then people can subscribe to your annotations, which show up in search results?

It seems very complicated and hard to wrap your head around to me.
It's definitely not end-user friendly in terms of creating annotations.

For example, ok I'm in Contributor -> Topics -> Manage Topics and it says

URL Contains: ... Label: ... [Filter]

err, what?
is a label a tag?
filter what?
I don't understand.

I gather it's some sort of search for things that you have labelled yourself.
For example if I enter scilib.typepad.com and library it says

Showing URLs containing scilib.typepad.com

with label library

.

If I actually want to mark stuff up, I have to make some annotation file, or contexts file.
What are these?  I don't know.  Some sort of XML I have to write.

Now I realize, not everything is necessarily an end-user tool.
This thing seems mainly for developers who want to add subscribable search dojiggers,
and for large organizations that have the capacity to annotate lots of pages.

But I have to say, in terms of innovation, it seems to me Google is adrift.
It would help at least if, when announcing things, they would indicate whether they are 70, 20 or 10.
This is their model of focus, where 70% is search+ads, 20% is supporting tools, and 10% is just fringe toy stuff.  I can certainly understand if a 10% thing is rather obscure and not particularly user friendly.  But it's hard to tell what is what.  Is Co-op core?  What is it? 

Cool things from Google:
- clean simple relevant search
- Ajazzy Google Maps
- Google Earth (based on Keyhole acquisition)
- Picasa (acquisition and sadly neglected - where is my Picasa geotagging?)

Yahoo seems to be beating them with relevant, popular acquisitions like delicious and Flickr.

Ever since Google went public, Google is about search and, well, every other random half-baked web thing you can imagine, as far as I can tell.

Disappointing.

You know what I want from Google?
Better SEARCH.  Cooler, more relevant, categories, visualization, whatever.

Comments

[Eby]

If your talking about the subscribed links portion, one of the benefits is that it allows people to subscribe to your services and then they get useful results on keywords you specify. For an example with library uses:

http://blog.ryaneby.com/archives/research-guides-in-google/

[Darren McLaughlin]

Don't feel bad: no one gets it! Your sentiments echo my own, exactly. There's just no purpose for the Coop.