Del.icio.us - Save/Share/Search/Discover Favorite Links

Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website belonging to Yahoo that let’s you store, share and organize yours and discover others favorite links. While this may not sound very enticing as many people can simply store their favourites on their computers, there are two main things del.icio.us gives that your locally stored bookmarks don’t. Firstly, by storing your favourites on del.icio.us server you can access them anytime from anywhere as long as you are connected to the internet. Secondly, and most importantly it provides you an access to favourites of other del.icio.us users, and there are millions of them.

What these millions of users provide to you?

When users want to store a particular URL on del.icio.us they are asked to provide tags (aka keywords) that identify this link. For instance, if you would want to save on del.icio.us the URL address of this page, you could have provided following tags: makeusof, del.icio.us, blog, reviewes or if would want to bookmark an ebay.com you could use following tags: ‘online auctions,ebay,bargain’. In addition you would have the option, to make this stored favourite either public or private. If it is private it is available only to you and no one esle, if it is stored as public on the other hand then any del.icio.us user will be able to see it.

So coolest feature of del.icio.us:
In 3 years of its existence due to huge user base on del.icio.us number of stored links in their database grew enormously. Any link/favourite in this database has tags that were assigned to it by user who has submitted it. When you use search on del.icio.us to look for something as a results you get links that were tagged with same term as a search term you have used. I will try to illustrate this below with an example;

I have searched for ‘photos’ on delicious(let me call it that way from now on), and below you can see a partial screenshot of the result I got.

By looking at the results above, you can see that the link that appears first links to yotophoto.com was tagged by the term ‘photos’ by 5129 different users and the the one that appears second linking to famous photo sharing website flickr.com was tagged with ‘photos’ by 18255 people. To put it simply, results you get are far more relavant that you would get any other search engine be it a Google or any other. However, I also observed that while delicious may produce very relavant results for popular terms it may be not so good for specialised terms(ex; nuclear physics). As delicious will grow further even very topic specific terms will become more an more relavant due to user contributions.

Some other nice features:

If you found this article useful then please help us spread the word by Stumbling It.

If you like this article then subscribe to MakeUseOf feed and get latest articles delivered to your Feedreader. If you want to recieve latest articles in your email click here. It's FREE!