Google AutoLink Service

See: Microsoft Smart-Tag Service, Google AutoFill Service, Selection-based Search Service.

References

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoLink
- An autolink is a hyperlink added automatically to a hypermedia document, after it has been authored or published. Segments of the hypermedia are identified through a process of pattern matching. For example in hypertext, the software could recognise textual patterns for street addresses, phone numbers, ISBNs, or URLs.
- In a distributed hypermedia system, such as the World Wide Web, autolinking can be carried out by client or server software. For example, a web server could add links to a web page as it sends it to a web browser. A browser can also add links to a page after it has received it from the server.
http://www.google.com/support/toolbar/bin/static.py?page=features.html
- AutoLink: The online review of a great new restaurant has the place's address but no map. You could type the restaurant's street, city, and ZIP code into the search box, but why bother, when clicking the Toolbar's AutoLink button will automatically create a link to an online map (US addresses only)? AutoLink can also link package tracking numbers to delivery status, VIN numbers (US) to vehicle history, and publication ISBN numbers to Amazon.com listings.

(Milne & Witten, 2008a) ⇒ David N. Milne, and Ian H. Witten. (2008). “Learning to Link with Wikipedia.” In: Proceeding of the 17th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, (CIKM 2008). doi:10.1145/1458082.1458150
- Automatically augmenting text with links to web pages has been controversial in the past. When developing Windows XP, Microsoft released plans for the Smart-Tag service which was to automatically add links to web-pages within Windows Explorer. This was aborted when many expressed concern that pages were being “surreptitiously” modified for commercial purposes (Mossberg, 2001). Google’s AutoLink feature has received similar criticism and has not been widely accepted. Consequently automatic linking is most successful when restricted to safe domains such as cinema (Drenner et al. 2006).