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.