Del.izzy Does What Del.icio.us Won’t: Search The Full Text Of Your Bookmarks
by Erick Schonfeld on August 18, 2008

When you search your bookmarks on del.icio.us, all you are searching is the tags, titles, and descriptions. If you want to search the full text of the underlying bookmarked pages themselves, you have to go to Del.izzy, a site out of Melbourne, Australia that was hacked together in three days. Del.izzy takes each page that you’ve bookmarked and puts it through a Google custom search to bring back results for the search terms you enter.

It is a pretty obvious feature, and there is no reason why del.icio.us, which is owned by Yahoo, can’t do this itself. And perhaps it was simply a design decision. You could argue that searching only through tags, titles, and descriptions returns better results because all of the words in those elements are essentially explicit, higher-level categorizations of the content being bookmarked. And the nice thing about searching on del.cio.us is that you can get results for everyone’s bookmarks, not just your own.

But by searching the actual text of the pages themselves, you can catch keywords that were not captured elsewhere. And in this case, more results are better, because any one person’s set of bookmarks is going to be a relatively limited set of pages.

The problem with Del.izzy is that it doesn’t search the tags, titles, or descriptions. It only searches the text of the underlying pages. What you want is a bookmark search that does both.

A search for “video advertising,” for instance, turned up the same top result, but the rest were all different (see screen shots below). Are the Del.izzy results better? Not really. But they show you what you is missing from a standard del.icio.us search.

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Comments

This is all fine if the assumption is that the average user has a rather small number of bookmarks in use. However, for the hardcore bookmarkers I think this is prone to return less relevant results.
And speaking of the CSE, has anybody noticed if certain sites are prioritized?

 

Searching tags is better.

BTW, check out the story on the front page of TL, cell phone users are going to crap their pants. Look at the video.

TL - http://xrl.us/moretechnews

Hey spammer, I’m not wearing pants.

 
 
 

thats nice and all, but when will I be able to sort my delicious searches by popularity?

 

Looks like it might be interesting, but I doubt I will probably stick with del.icio.us. There is always room for improvement though… and this points that out.

 

Blah, that is I will probably stick with del.icio.us. This is what happens when I comment with no coffee in my system. :)

 

I’d like to see Yahoo do this themselves, considering how easily it can integrated into del.icio.us. Or is this a property Yahoo would want to swallow?

Dave Silverberg
DigitalJournal.com

 

This is the killer feature for me, search not tag. Though tags come in useful search still wins the day. This is the single reason why I stick with Google Bookmarks and migrated off of Delicious. If Delicious could provide search of “the page + my bookmark metadata” then Delicious win me back (Google Bookmarks lacks by having few tools to integrate the bookmarks into various browsers).

 
 

Twine will have all of the above capabilities in the very near future, and more (semantic search).

 

You know, Simpy (at http://simpy.com ) had this functionality years ago.

 
 

deliGoo (http://www.deligoo.com) did the same thing much earlier…

 
 

Yahoo did this already too — it was called MyWeb (http://myweb.search.yahoo.com).

 

Looks like it has been done before but the packaging this time with Google custom search does make for a better user experience

 

News: Hi, we’re currently throttled from the del.icio.us API.

What does this mean to you? It means that del.izzy will be unavailable for the next 20 minutes or more. Please come back soon! (Apologies for the delay…)

 

Thanks for all the support all, however, del.icio.us has throttled our connection…

We’ve contacted them and are waiting for a reply. In the meantime, please check back when you can. We’ve patched del.izzy so that we have less likelihood of getting throttled again…

 

del.icio.us limits the use of the API from one IP - it is the first reason for which we made deliGoo in the form of browser add-on.

Second reason - search box for more convenient to have at hand and not go every time on the site.

In any case - good luck to you guys!

 

why does delicious throttle the use of delicious? That is being evil.

Yahoo/del.icio.us never claimed that they would do no evil :), that was some other company :)

I don’t see how del.icio.us is interested in 3rd parties outshining their service in any way. It is a shame, it would be great if all companies played nice, but i certainly won’t be holding my breath.

well i thought delicious was good. Now im not so sure.

 
 
 

google bookmarks also searches through pages content. very useful.

 

Anyone one can do this (and more) with Google Custom Search (e.g. http://www.spoof.cc)

 

I’m know I’m late to the comment party here, but Diigo already does all of this (search title, tags, page content), allows highlighting and commenting, and will post to delicious at the same time. Not sure why anyone would use delicious any more.

 

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