This week I was doing some research on php and unicode. I put my search terms into Google and just wasn’t getting what I wanted. It was kind of frustrating.
An hour or two later, I decided to try something different. I’d used del.icio.us as my search engine. I found exactly what was I looking for.
It really makes the case that human-powered search may be the direction where things should go. Yahoo was genius for snatching del.icio.us up.
You’ve seen so many other services which want you to enter in explicit feedback about a Web site (digg, stumble upon) but it just doesn’t make complete sense. It’s hard to get a lot of involvement. With del.icio.us, they take advantage of the natural instinct to bookmark a Web page and organize those bookmarks.
Have you used sites like del.icio.us, Mahalo, or ChaCha as search engines? If so, what do you think? If no, what’s holding you back?
5 responses so far ↓
Samantha Warren // September 9, 2007 at 9:11 pm
Unfortunately i still default to Google for so much of my internet research, but I have heard del.icio.us can be a more useful tool depending on the circumstance. One of my Ogilvy colleagues wrote a blog post about this a few weeks ago as well… http://rohitbhargava.typepad.com/weblog/2007/08/how-to-find-sit.html
Widening the range of search from Google to del.icio.us and human-powered Cha-Cha « Compassion in Politics // September 10, 2007 at 2:29 am
[...] who is tech geek extraordinaire to the Library of Congress for pointing me in the direction of Cha-cha and del.icio.us. So I guess it might just be time to put on your dancing shoes or doing whatever you’d do with [...]
Jeff // September 10, 2007 at 10:11 am
I use del.icio.us as a seach engine all the time. It is great for finding info plus you know you are probably not gonna run into spam or crappy links since these were personally picked by users of the service rather then a seach engine indexing everything.
(jeff)isageek
Jesse Thomas // September 11, 2007 at 12:52 pm
yeah ive been doing this since I started using del.icio years ago.. I love finding notes ppl dont intend for people to be reading.. and you have the payoff of finding a quality account with a stocked tag.. which you cant get with google.. the question is why isnt yahoo leveraging more of this great content in their search results…
compassioninpolitics // September 17, 2007 at 3:21 am
I just ran across this today regarding delicious meets google. Deligoo.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/deligoo_mashes_google_with_delicious.php
Also, Lijit is mentioned in the comments and seems to be an interesting way to search your “lifestream.” Thoughts?
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