Delicious search engines
Tuesday, 22. November 2005, 15:35:15
I don't know if it's happening to someone else, but I am frequently using del.icio.us over Google as a search engine. And not just del.icio.us but a few new services that have appeared, which are increasingly basing their contents on the very users that come and visit, or on external user contents, such as blogs. And these user-generated contents are proving to be more reliable than anybody thought.
del.icio.us (and any other on-line social bookmarking tool) is of course the first example, and the most prominent too. But we could mention some others. Digg, for instance, is a tech-news source, based on stories all over the net, submitted to Digg by the users. The key point is that there's no central editorial authority deciding which stories go to the front page. The editors are the users, which collectively decide through a voting system, which are the most popular articles.
Another innovative example are intelligent blog crawlers, such as Blogniscient and Memeorandum, which automatically crawls the blogosphere for popular, hot articles, that are then shown in their respective homepages, categorized by subjects. They're some sort of Google News homepage for the blogosphere.
And finally, my latest discovery, diggdot.us, is a parasite of the parasites (just kidding). This new tool merges popular content from Digg, Slashdot and del.icio.us into their homepage, taking advantage of the popularity of these three.
But what's the big deal about these and other similar services? Are they worth as search engines? If you know what you are looking for, you might prefer Yahoo! or Google or some other, in any of their flavors and services. But what if you are just wandering, looking for whatever is hot right at the moment on the web?
del.icio.us (and any other on-line social bookmarking tool) is of course the first example, and the most prominent too. But we could mention some others. Digg, for instance, is a tech-news source, based on stories all over the net, submitted to Digg by the users. The key point is that there's no central editorial authority deciding which stories go to the front page. The editors are the users, which collectively decide through a voting system, which are the most popular articles.
Another innovative example are intelligent blog crawlers, such as Blogniscient and Memeorandum, which automatically crawls the blogosphere for popular, hot articles, that are then shown in their respective homepages, categorized by subjects. They're some sort of Google News homepage for the blogosphere.
And finally, my latest discovery, diggdot.us, is a parasite of the parasites (just kidding). This new tool merges popular content from Digg, Slashdot and del.icio.us into their homepage, taking advantage of the popularity of these three.
But what's the big deal about these and other similar services? Are they worth as search engines? If you know what you are looking for, you might prefer Yahoo! or Google or some other, in any of their flavors and services. But what if you are just wandering, looking for whatever is hot right at the moment on the web?
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