Earlier in the year, we posed the question, "are social bookmarking sites better at search than Google?" At the time, some people thought they already were. Our conclusion then was that social bookmarking data was better suited to augment or enhance traditional search results or rankings, not act as a main source on their own. We also noted that they generally seemed to perform best with technology related queries, because their users were skewed toward those who work in technology.
It would appear that the latter has not changed much over the past seven months. Yesterday, Yahoo! released the top 10 del.icio.us tags for 2007, and with they exception of "music" at #4 and "travel" a #8, they are exclusively related to technology (with slight license taken to include "photography" and "games" in with the tech crowd). Below is the full list:
While the list did include search staples like video, music, and travel, the inclusion of a Linux distribution as the 7th most tagged item of the year is telling: del.icio.us is still not mainstream. Notably absent, of course, are tags about celebrities/gossip, sports, health, and major world news items. Those sort of things, which are massively popular each year among mainstream searchers, need to be present before anyone can seriously start to think about social bookmarking sites as a good basis for a search engine.
Of course, for those who wish to try, you could check out deliGoo (review) or 50 Matches (review).
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Perhaps if you are interested in celebrity gossip, but if you are interested in technology, science, etc, del.icio.us rocks, so as a niche search engine, there is a place for social bookmarking.
I did notice that some of those tags are consumer technology. That in itself is an improvement.
Posted by: Deepak | December 5, 2007 10:28 AM
"Design" is exclusively related to technology?? How about landscape design, interior design, fashion design, and food design...just to name a few?
I think Del.icio.us and social bookmarking in general will always be less pop culture oriented as most people bookmark sites with utility rather than news. So its reasonable that the majority of bookmarked sites are technology-related since they are both the early adopters and those sites often present content or tools relevant to the tech industry at large.
Most of the top 10 search keywords/keyphrases on pop culture appear to stem from major news breakers of the past year (i.e. Britney divorce, Britney not wearing undies, Britney driving with kids, etc.) that are relatively short-lived in audience consumption but have mass appeal at initial posting.
Posted by: webonics | December 5, 2007 10:36 AM
Yeah, mostlyforgeeks is how I tagged this article on... wait for it... wait for it... del.icio.us
there is a time and a place for everything, just because it has not been overrun by masses of teens looking for the heads up on the latest Paris scandal does not take away from the immense value and utility it holds for those who seriously grok and use it
Posted by: Mario Olckers | December 5, 2007 10:44 AM
@webonomics: If you visit del.icio.us, though, you'll notice that 'design' refers overwhelmingly to the web and graphic variety. ;)
Posted by: Josh Catone | December 5, 2007 11:15 AM
I think this highlights a failing of Delicious, why don't they have something like my.delicious where you have a type of start page that has all of your bookmarks? I've used Foxmarks to sync my bookmarks, but with so much information out there I just get lost when I add too much to my local bookmarks - with Delicious it's easier since I can forget about them and then still find them via tags. I know Firefox 3 will have support for tags, but again, I'd have to rely on Foxmarks or something else, to sync them, and I don't know if I'd go back that way yet. So yeah, it's funny Del never caught on, it's a good service, I think it just needs to be more integrated with either Firefox, or provide more of a base on their site. Make it sticky as they used to say!
Posted by: fak3r | December 5, 2007 11:22 AM
@fak3r I integrated my del.icio.us perfectly with Firefox with the Firefox del.icio.us plugin. I hit the del.icio.us button several times a day. How would you like to see it more integrated? Into its core?
The Firefox plugin also adds a button for the 'my.delicious' page you referred to. It simply takes you to your bookmarks.
PS I love typing dots.
Posted by: Anne Helmond | December 5, 2007 11:52 AM
Interesting thought: maybe it's better than search because it doesn't try to be all things to all people?
Looking at the success of digg and reddit I've clearly seen that there's something to be said to being niche: the signal to noise ratio is so much higher.
I wish delicious had a better search though.
Posted by: engtech | December 5, 2007 12:00 PM
It's disingenuous to associate a lack of Faith In The Centrality Of Technology with a fatuous interest in "celebrity gossip." Until and unless a tool, app or service exits the tech ghetto it is useless. Period. Books, movies, travel, politics, family, health, outdoors, religion, music -- all much, much, much more important than a 500-million-dollar tautology-machine that a clutch of geeks holds up with one hand and no one else gives a rat's ass about. It serves the larger public or it gets the hose again.
Posted by: Curt | December 5, 2007 12:36 PM
Music was and will be always there on top 10.
Is so big industry that the keyword can't miss out.
http://www.canzoni32.com/testi/t/the-nixons/index.php
Posted by: Canzoni32 | December 6, 2007 1:05 AM
Delicious does not do good at celebrities, sports news & so on because it's meant for what you want to keep over time. Not the latest updates. It's as simple as that to me.
Still of course it's mainly a geek thing, and as engtech says delicious search algorithms feel like they could well be improved.
Posted by: NatC | December 6, 2007 1:35 AM
What NatC said. ...and most people searching for Britney Spears probably want to do it privately (just guessing), which is where search engines are theoretically better for that type of information.
Posted by: Jamie Stephens | December 6, 2007 9:05 AM
I love using StumbleUpon for search...Though I still return to Google a lot.
Posted by: David Mackey | December 7, 2007 10:27 PM
Can someone point me to information or research on how a crawler or indexer pulls keywords from web pages? I see that del.icio.us uses a combination of a user's and other users' tags to make recommendations when saving a new article and I curious to research and learn the details of how a piece of software determines what's a relevant keyword or not.
Thanks
Posted by: Jeff | December 8, 2007 2:44 PM
Would anyone have any stats on how many of the URLs that are bookmarked on del.icio.us are dead?
Thanks
Posted by: Jeff | December 9, 2007 10:18 AM