Comments for Delicious Preview - Next Gen Search For Yahoo?

Delicious Preview - Next Gen Search For Yahoo?

2007-09-07T12:59:23Z

A new version of Delicious (sans dots) was released as a private preview today. I got an invite and have been poking around. Techcrunch got the exclusive on the story, so they have a full review up. But in my initial quick tests, a couple of features immediately stood out for me. We've written a number of times before on Read/WriteWeb about how del.icio.us, sorry Delicious, can be used as a very effective search engine. Likewise, Alex Iskold has also written before about Delicious as a recommendation system:

"...the del.icio.us approach holds intriguing possibilities of self-organizing classification and recommendation systems. With enough users and more tweaking, social tagging can result in a system that works equally well for books, wine and music."

]]> In another post, Alex also called it a "a gem of hidden information". Indeed, given that some of the comments on our 10 Future Web Trends post suggested crowd sourcing as a future trend worth watching, it seems to me that Delicious as a general crowd-sourced search solution is close to becoming a reality. As an example, a quick search for "web future" in Delicious Preview displayed a lot of popular (and some very old) links. But they were quality links, useful resources. Which is mostly what you want from a search engine.

So Delicious Preview is kind of like PageRank, only it's run via crowd sourcing. It's not an algorithm that primarily determines results (although that is a part of it), but thousands of 'votes' by Delicious users.

Another thing worth noting is Delicious' move towards becoming a social network, as founder Joshua Schachter spoke to R/WW about exactly one year ago. Some of these networking features are already on the current del.icio.us, but have become more refined in the new version. Here's a couple of screenshots.

Overall, Delicious still feels like an experiment in progress. But there could be profound implications for Delicious' owner, Yahoo - particularly in search. Yahoo is known to be pushing 'social search' as a way to compete with Google (Answers, Flickr, Delicious, etc), and the new Delicious Preview is another move in refining that vision.

Comment from Yakov on 2007-09-07

2007-09-07T17:08:01Z

Having seen the screenshots of a new version, I have to say that the service needs better visual representation of tags.

Comment from Thejesh GN on 2007-09-08

2007-09-08T08:20:20Z

Yes. I think thats what they are trying to do. With the kind and volume of urls they have the search results might be very relevant.

Comment from Naser on 2007-09-08

2007-09-08T12:03:28Z

As long as del.icio.us isn't introducing a "Local Archive/Cache" feature, I'm not sinking my teeth on the same sandwich again. I'm still quite satisfied with Furl.

Besides, this looks like another facebookish makeover. Why in the world is everyone so desperate for looks? Why can't they improve the basic-features first?

Comment from Erkko on 2007-09-09

2007-09-09T17:28:43Z

Moving forward with Delicious is a great idea from Yahoo, as it still is one of the best implemented services using tagging and living proof of user filtered searching.

I also like the change of name, just hated those dots in the name.

Comment from Andy Pipes on 2007-09-09

2007-09-10T06:49:51Z

I'd personally like to see a lot more with tag bundle relationship modeling and closed (private) tag networks, for information sharing etc. Seems that delicious is missing a trick there.

Comment from Naren Reddy on 2007-09-26

2007-09-26T16:59:34Z

Don't kill del.icio.us after delicious offical launch.
Also in Delicious don't try to put too much content in the front page like yahoo.com

Make it simple and elegent & user frinedly.