Mashable on Google Co-op

I haven't tried Trends yet so I really haven't gotten Co-op. Lucky for me, Mashable took the time to go through it.

From Google Co-Op:

"Google Co-op is about sharing expertise. You can contribute your expertise and benefit when others do the same. Help other users find information more easily by creating “subscribed links” for your services and labeling webpages around the topics you know best. This is a work in progress, but even in its early stages, Google Co-op has the potential to let you contribute your expertise to the overall goal of making information more discoverable for everyone."

From Mashable:

"Sounds simple? It’s not. I just spent a full hour trying to grok the service and I’m still not sure how to describe it. From what I can see, there appear to be two important features. The first is subscribed links: you can subscribe to any site and have its results appear above the organic Google results.

In the same way that Google Finance data appears at the top of a search for AAPL, you might choose to have news stories from Digg appear first. There’s a directory of sites to choose from, or you can try to add your own (good luck!). The second part is tagging - contributors can “label” results and create a vertical search engine of sorts (like this one on Autos). Once again, contributing your own work is a real challenge - and even the smartest geeks are struggling."