Can social bookmarking be used for search engines?

jesusphreak

I've always kind of wondered about this.

With social bookmarking, you get links that people value, you get every link automatically described, titled, and categorized by thousands of people, and you have a rating system of sorts.

Isn't this ideal for beating even a search engine like Google?

Krak

Interesting. I think it might work better for looking for a site or place that is about something you are looking for. I dont think you could use it to go straight to a search item though. Like if I wanted to lookup engine specifics on a 1972 Chevy C10, social bookmarks could lead you to a site all about C10's or old Chevys, maybe Chevy Engines. Google would most likely pop out the specific page I wanted in the first few results. It all depends on what people bookmark, and it would grow and evolve after time. Im still worried about spam with those social bookmark things. Whats to keep people from pluggin their own site or things like that. Plus, I hate the layout of del.icio.us.

jesusphreak

Yeah, del.icio.us's layout really sucks. I'm amazed that they don't even make an attempt at cleaning it up - its not like it would even be a lot of work.

Spam generally doesn't seem to be a problem because of the nature of the beast. Useful links are copied by others and worthless ones aren't. So you actually get a pretty good idea of what is good and what isn't.

A nice clean social bookmarking manager I've found (though it still has problems of its own) is Reddit. I think its pretty cool and definitely is worth checking out.

Mark

I haven't looked into it, but apparently delicious has a great API that allows you to completely customize the way it looks. All that aside, I don't really think that social bookmarking is the be-all answer for search engines. I've been thinking about this for quite a while, and I think social bookmarks are never going to be as good as an application like google, and most of the time they will only help in a niche market. For example, delicious (due to it's ugly interface) is used primarily by a certain type of person - I'll use "web geek" for lack of a better term. Web geeks are interested in all things geeky on the web. Just take a look at the popular list to see what the typical delicious user is interested in. There are *some* things that slide out of mainstream geekdom, but for the most part they all follow a similar genre or category of subject. Google, on the other hand, doesn't care about the topic. Google stores everything, so it has all the answers. I have been toying with an idea for a few years now which I'm not really going to talk about on here, but if I can someday do lussumo work full time, I'll begin work on it, and in my grandiose pipe-dream world it will kick google's ass.

jesusphreak

Mark, let us invest money into your venture and your dream will come true.

giginger

I've heard lots about del.icio.us but never signed up until now. I see it more as an alternative to sending an e-mail of links to check out home.

lech

Tagging has a great ability to totally backfire in nearly any circumstance. While it is useful, there's a great chance that what one person tags something with will sometimes differ greatly to say, what your mother or grandmother will tag that same item with. Thus skewing the results greatly. Last.fm uses the tagging base for their music library, and have you ever attempted to listen to the D&B channels and some numbskull marked some random reggae as D&B? there would have to be a heavy dose of moderation in any of these scenarios. But then again, isn't this what pageranking is useful for? it's too bad we couldn't access the pagerank stats on google and vote whether the page listing in there is worthy of the search you queried for.