Delicious: The Future of Search
Del.icio.us is one of my favorite search engines. It’s basically the only one that I use other than Google and Technorati. Delicious is a social bookmarking site and I’m not even sure it can be classified as a search engine, but I use it as one anyways.
For at least half the searches I perform now Delicious serves up far better results than Google. They’re better because they’re community driven. Other people just like myself have bookmarked and tagged these sites as their favorites. I know that if 2500 other people have bookmarked a site chances are it’s pretty good. Of course there will always be the need for long tail searches and I’m not sure Delicious can ever replace Google in that area, but we’ll see.
I’m convinced this is the future of search. The only problem is that as Delicious gets more popular, spam will start creeping into the results. I can only hope they come up with some way to prevent spam from happening. I can’t imagine it would be hard for someone to figure out a way to game Delicious if the rewards were good enough.
Cameron Olthuis is the Founder of
yeah, that’s what i do too. i actually first use delicous then i go to google and maybe yahoo. delicious offers far better results in my case. i think delicious is slow sometimes. still there are some nice plugins/addons for netvibes, pageflakes, firefox and so on, that make live really easy concerning social bookmarking. thanks to all those that share theirs.
sascha
Sascha, good to see I’m not the only one using it for search. Can you share some of your favorite FireFox plugins for searching social sites, I’m probably missing out on some good ones.
I agree too. Delicious is an awesome search engine - quite amazingly better than Google.
However, we should qualify that: delicious’ particular utility for us is founded on the simple fact that this online stuff is our area of professional/personal interest and so delicious is frankly unbeatable because it offers a distillation of the finest selections that people with the *same interests as us* have handpicked. It may not be such a great search engine for broader areas of interest.
I cannot say this for sure, and I’m sure the tag base is becoming broader and richer all of the time beyond the online nerdy world, but if you take a look at most delicious tag clouds it’s all about web2, usability, xhtml, ajax and all that clever stuff.
Will, very good points. I guess that is what I was trying to say when I said…
“Of course there will always be the need for long tail searches and I’m not sure Delicious can ever replace Google in that area, but we’ll see.”
I’m just not as good as getting my point across as clearly as you
But yeah, for broader areas of interest it still has a long way to go.
I agree, del.icio.us is a fantastic resource. I use it both as a bookmarking service and a search engine (but mostly when I’m hunting for things in the tech sphere). It’ll be interesting to see if it thrives or tanks in other markets.