del.icio.us as a search engine

February 3, 2006

I was driving around in the intense heat this afternoon with my husband, talking to him about the whole “Me first” concept. I was talking about how lately I’ve been using del.icio.us as a search engine more and more. It’s probably not suitable for all types of searches just yet, but are the links on delicious of a better quality and more relevant to me than, say, on Google?

Are relevant links being discovered faster by the massive del.icio.us user-base than search bots?
Are there less link-farms and unnaturally-rank-inflated sites on del.icio.us?

A (non-scientific sample of 1) example. I’m looking for some new fonts and search for “fonts”.

Google returns about 59,600,000 results.
del.icio.us returns 14,099 results.

More doesn’t necessarily mean better.

del.icio.us Top 10:

Google’s Top 10:

So, using different criteria, we end up with quite different lists, dafont and myfonts appearing on each (although people on delicious prefer the myfonts.com “What the font” feature more than the home page).

Which is the better list? I guess we could argue that it’s subjective but on the other hand I suppose billions have been spent on finding the “best” listing. And millions of people aren’t using Google primarily because of its ~~nice~~ simple design, right?

At a really simple level, Google ranks sites based on the number of other sites which link up to them and weighted according to who is doing the linking.

But the point I’ve been wondering about is the difference between a link and a bookmark.

On my blog I could link up to a tonne of different webpages I find interesting for one reason or another. But I might not go back to that site, I might not need to remember that site’s URL for future reference.

A bookmark, however, implies more value than a link. I’ve already visited it once and it’s something I want to go back to in the future.

I think social bookmarking could be a central part of future algorithms of successful search engines.

Seekum is already heading along this path:

Seekum gets web pages from Yahoo web search, social bookmarking services, and pages that our users submit to us. Seekum then finds pages with related content into search results for a page based on keyword analysis, tags, and link analysis.

Seekum allows its users to sort through and find the best results for a given query. WeRank allows all of the good results to lift to the top, and the bad results to be lost into oblivion. The users have the last word on what’s relevant.

Have you been finding del.icio.us to be a useful search engine? Do you know of any other search engines exploring this area?

Update: Can’t wait to see Magnolia – “found is the new search” launch!

Update 2: Seth Godin’s thoughts resonate with my post too.

http://jamdo.com Rob

The human element to voting on best content is what makes the results in delicious better.

But I think I remember hearing something about Google incorporating the data from their Analytics into their search data – eg if lot’s of people bookmarked your site, then it gets a better ranking etc. Of course, I am not sure how they plan to take over the world with Analytics before that happens, but anyway…
http://www.cuckoobird.net Matthew Price

I often use del.icio.us as a search engine as well. Its so much easier to find great sites, especially anything techie. I think that the search engines of the future will rely much more on user feedback in determining a site’s rank.
http://www.annezelenka.com Anne Zelenka

It seems like every day you write something I want to write about too. I was just reading Alex Barnett on tags and remembering a Shirky article about tags, thinking I was going to blog it today. Then I get to you in my feedreader and voila! Tags as search engine. Perfect.

I agree that bookmarks should be valued higher than a link.

I haven’t yet used delicious as a search engine like you describe, but I wonder if another reason it works better than Google is because it gives you fresher results than Google. Pages that have been around a long time are more likely to show up in Google’s top results because they’ve had more time to collect lots of links. But lots of links over time may not be as meaningful as a few bookmarks from thoughtful people happening in the recent past.
hullabaloo

Rachel give gada.be a shot. Very slick metasearch. Especially convenient because its sorta “all the above” Engines at once.
hullabaloo

Oh dont forget http://populicio.us for a “d” highlights
Rachel

Thank hullabaloo – I had a look at both of those, interesting. I haven’t found the way delicious shows popular links to be an issue for me, but I’m sure people would find populicious as a nice alternative… although in this context, it doesn’t offer search. I found gada.be to be a little overwhelming, I kinda just want one list of options.. maybe I need to give it a few more goes though.

Thanks Anne for stopping by, I’ve been reading your RSS (esp. on OPML) and have been meaning to leave a comment.

Fresh links seem to work well in Google News but they take time elsewhere, especially the much-talked-about Google “sandbox” effect. I hope delicious developers are realising the massive potential of their bookmarking for search engine development.
hullabaloo

Read the about page for shortcuts and tagging then you’ll see some big benefits. also they have a very powerful OPML option which gives you the ability to “pick-off” the RSS feed you would utilize… Hmmmm…
http://www.solutionwatch.com Brian Benzinger

Excellent post. I agree with you 100%. I personally search on del.icio.us just as much as I do Google at this point. I think one of the main benefits of using a social bookmarking service for searching is that links tend to be more reliable because you can see how many others have bookmarked it before. I also feel that a lot of the results are usually more recent and up to date links then what a search engine would return. Google runs by Page Rank, which really anyone can build their PR up with some work, but social bookmarking works has multiple factors and usually based off of the amount of bookmarks.

I feel that search is social bookmarking could be the new search, but I also feel that I couldn’t live without normal searching with Google. Both work very well but are just better for certain searches.

It will definitely be interesting to see how things workout in time as far as searching goes.

As far as what Hullabaloo has suggested, http://gada.be is definitely very useful for searching social services. You may also want to check out Gnosh, which is a college student project that is also a meta search service (http://webtools.allegheny.edu/gnosh/index.php).

Great article, Rachel.
http://mindvalley.blogspot.com Mike

I would recommend that you search for “fonts” on http://www.blinklist.com. It is a great discovery engine. Here is the link to save you the trouble:
http://www.blinklist.com/tag/fonts/

Would love to hear your thoughts on our new service. Mike
http://amcptwo.blogspot.com/ Alex Morganis

I use Yahoo! MyWeb 2.0. I love the AJAX-like features.
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http://www.namesatwork.com Antony

This post set me to thinking. Results at http://www.namesatwork.com/blog/2006/02/07/delicious-search/

Thanks as always.
http://chronotron.wordpress.com Chrono Cr@cker

Interesting, very interesting. Good food for thought Rachel. Again, yes I will agree with you. In CERTAIN aspects and I repeat certain topics alone, Del.icio.us will serve as a better guide than Google, simply because it is user-driven. You see Link Backing is not done because people like the article. It’s done cause its a source, an affiliate or it’s paid for while that cannot be done @ DIU.

But then, Google is king and will remain for a long long time and Wikipedia is always there for the full factual list!
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http://www.newsletter.ie Chris

I would agree with Brian above who says that social bookmarking is the new search. But it’s more than that. Amazon’s “people who bought this book also bought the following…” can be read as “people who think like you”. We all like shortcuts and pointers from our community peers will always have more weight than a commercial search servive like gogl. Recommendations via Social networking always outperform commercial recommendations. But there are dangers to such so-called joined up thinking. As I pointed out on michele’s blog (www.mneylon.com) -who quoted your post today- I always like to remind myself “Do you think everyone else thinks like you do?”. A Healthy thought.
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http://play-games-vqhb.blogspot.com/ Walter

Hello, you have great site!

del.icio.us as a search engine

Hi, I'm Rachel Cunliffe!

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