deliGoo Mashes Google with del.icio.us
deliGoo is a nifty new add on for Firefox 2.0+ and IE 6.0+ that mashes up del.icio.us with Google Custom Search. The way it works is by creating a Google Custom Search engine based on all of a user's del.icio.us bookmarks, all of the bookmarks under a single tag, or all of the bookmarks under a single tag from a single user.
This can be very helpful for people who want to find something from among many untagged bookmarks, or for people who don't care to bother with tags but still want to get some utility out of del.icio.us. deliGoo can also be helpful to search among the collective knowledge of a large group of people (i.e., if I search only among sites tagged with "MySQL," I am presumably searching among the knowledge of a bunch of database gurus).
Unfortunately, deliGoo has some oddities and drawbacks that make it less useful than it could be. One of the major things that jumped out at me is just how useless the Firefox extension actually is. The purpose of the extension is to provide quick access to a deliGoo search engine, however, all it really does is provide a link to their search page. A simple bookmark would work just as well.
The biggest drawback, however, is that creating a search engine takes time, and it has to recreate yours every time you use it. (At least, every time you navigate back to the page ... if you create a search engine and keep the results page open, it will save that search engine for as long as the page is active.) In the interest of time, deliGoo was set up so that you could use it without registering, but it would make a lot more sense if it remembered you and didn't have to rebuild your engine every time you needed to search.
I think the service would be much more useful if it let users sign up and create one or more custom search engines and had them readily accessible without having to wait for Google to index the sites each time. The site could add a manual or scheduled update option, so that if it has been a week and you've added 100 new bookmarks to your del.icio.us account, you can update your engine -- but on your schedule so you aren't forced to wait when you want access to your information quickly.
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I'm no expert, but it does seem like there'd be a better sounding way to incorporate Google that just using 'goo'. Just use the 'g' or something. Especially in combination with 'deli', there is just no way the picture it creates is anything good.
Agreed, DeliGoo sounds like the slime that forms on lunch meat when it gets old.
Marvelous idea, just a pity it doesn't work. I did it on my delicious set then searched for "ruby" and got back no results. Odd considering so many of my links are around ruby.
Still, either deliGoo needs to get it working or someone else will. Good idea. Keep us informed on this RWW, please.
Lijit provides a similar service without requiring you to install any software. It searches your Delicious bookmarks, blog, Flickr photos, and just about every other web service you might use. It also includes content from people in your networks; blogs in your blogroll, friends from Facebook, contacts from Delicious, etc... For example, check out all the data sources and network sources on my page:
http://www.lijit.com/users/stan
And it figures most of this out automatically when you signn up. Here you can see it figure out my whole identity by looking at my blog:
http://www.lijit.com/signup/content?uri=http://wanderingstan.com
You can use it to search your own content, or place the Lijit Wijit on your blog to let others search through all your stuff.
Sorry to sound like an advertisement, but there's just so much more you can do than merely searching Delicious bookmarks! (Plus I'm a little passionate about this stuff as the founder at CTO of Lijit. :)
How about Googleicious
This has already been done by a Googler.
http://basundi.com:8000/login.html
It can build refinements automatically (with machine learning).
I own googlicio.us .. I will let it go cheap :)
Why not roll your own using your del.icio.us feed (or any other DIY feed such as Google Docs) plus the new search facility in Google Reader. See http://blog.gobansaor.com/2007/09/10/google-reader-km-killer-app/
Admittedly the delicious part of the search is restricted to the tag/description/header meta data but in many cases that's 'good enough'.
Tom
Why not just use Simpy (see http://simpy.com/ ) and get full-text search there instead? Full-text searches take less than a second there.
See:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/simpy-user/message/600
and
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/simpy-user/message/606
The extension isn't useless.
They use the extension to screenscrape your del.icio.us public page to harvest the URLs, so that their server doesn't get banned by del.icio.us's notoriously fragile API.