Yan Pritzker photographer, entrepreneur, software engineer, musician, skier

del.icio.us is social search

Posted 18 April 2008 @ 4pm | Tagged del.icio.us, google, search, social, thoughts, yahoo

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I find myself more often turning to tag search on del.icio.us when I’m looking for ‘best of’ type searches. For example, if I’m shopping for a camera strap or looking for free icons, I turn to del.icio.us because I don’t want to sort through thousands of results based on relevancy determined by an algorithm; I want the results that people think are the best. And with the amount of data del.icio.us now has, it has become a great place to find things that are popular.

What’s interesting here is that social search is an emergent behavior of del.icio.us, which was designed primarily as a remote bookmarking tool. In the del.icio.us lesson on bokardo, Josh points out that “personal value precedes network value”. By optimizing for the bookmarking (personal) experience, yet making the early decision of keeping everything public by default, del.icio.us surfaces a gold mine of the “best of the best on the web”, and thus becomes exceptionally useful as a filtered search engine.

Because most of the data is put on del.icio.us for selfish reasons, it is by and large very high quality source of information. Del.icio.us is not easily ‘gamed’ by things like SEO because in order for your link to be popular, other people have to actually want to bookmark it as well. Thus I am inclined to trust a highly bookmarked result on del.icio.us over a highly ranking one on Google.

If Yahoo was smart, they would be integrating del.icio.us search results into their main search engine. Of course I would rather see Google do this but it so happens that Yahoo owns del.icio.us so a Google deal is less likely (yet not impossible in this mashed-up world). While Google continues to be a great place to start a random day, del.icio.us is becoming more and more my place to go when looking for a specific type of result.

Great suggestion. It’s a shame that the act of tagging & saving links is really only exclusive to those of us working in Web technology. On delicious, mainstream Web users just won’t find the same level of coverage for their favorite topics. For example, I wouldn’t tell my family member in logistics & manufacturing executive-search to go to delicious for relevant links. I, however, will continue to go to delicious for top links to ‘free icons’ etc. But maybe integration with a top search engine would help? And who else other than Yahoo!?

Yes this is true, but what is for web geeks today will be mainstream tomorrow. Twenty years ago email was used only by researchers. Fifteen years ago, the web was only for nerds and academics. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that ten years from now social search, tagging, and so on will be a prominent if not ubiquitous behavior for mainstream users. Yahoo and others can help speed this along by improving the visibility of these products (del.icio.us) so that the mainstream user can have access to them. Built in access in-browser would help too (imagine if local bookmarks were done away with completely, replaced with del.icio.us backed storage with a local cache for offline use).

I’m not so sure about tagging or the act of explicitly making a request to save a link – it all feels like turning yourself in to a human googbot. I used to tag everything in delicous, but then I realised how little I used to go back to my saved links. And even if I did need to go back, I’d usually remember enough about the link to be able to track in down through Google.

Email made communication quicker and/or more convenient to handle, but tagging definitely makes browsing slower. But I do think you’re right about social search catching on – it’ll just be far more streamlined than having to crank out a Firefox plugin, type a few keywords (which are probably already included in the link’s document body anyway), and then wait for the remote server to accept your request to save a link. It needs to live in the background and be automated by the attention you give to a link, be cursor movements, ajax requests, page refreshes, etc.

[...] del.icio.us is social search – skwpspace I find myself more often turning to tag search on del.icio.us when I’m looking for ‘best of’ type searches. (tags: delicious) [...]

I cannot understand why I should use del.icio.us or something similar. I have my Firefox bookmarks – that’s enough for me