Semergence

Seth Ladd’s blog about Ruby on Rails and crunching data.

del.icio.us + google would be nice

with 2 comments

Just thinking about how to get better ROI from my del.icio.us links. I typically put links in there that I want to retrieve later, usually multiple times. I don’t put transiently interesting links in there usually, as I know I’ll never go back there. I use del.icio.us to store links I know I’ll want to refer to again and again.

Problem is, del.icio.us is a black hole. I throw stuff in there, and I never return to it. Why? Because the little Google search box in firefox makes it way to easy to just search google.

What I need is a single search box, but with the ability to search google and del.icio.us. I want to see my del.icio.us links have very high priority on my google searches. If I can integrate the two databases, then I’d have something special.

I’m sure there’s a way to do this with a firefox plugin.

There real issue is, “How do I know I put something into del.icio.us?” Once it’s in there, how do I know I’m even able to retrieve it? That’s why google works so well, because I don’t have to know if it exists or not.. I just assume it does. With del.icio.us, that assumption isn’t valid all the time. But my workflow doesn’t involve me asking myself, “Maybe I bookmarked it, so first let me search del.icio.us” I need the searching of my bookmarks and the whole web to be integrated into one simple search.

Written by sethladd

July 21, 2006 at 9:44 am

2 Responses to 'del.icio.us + google would be nice'

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  1. +1

    You should check existing plug-ins & greasemonkey scripts, but I’m not sure a satisfactory solution exists. Direc.tor is the ultimate del.icio.us search mechanism, once you’ve decided to search your library.
    But the problem I think is also in a larger scale: so much quality metadata on the web was aggregated by del.icio.us users, that a mere statistical web search isn’t good enough without it. Do you have any ideas on how to come up with a web search service utilizing all this metadata? Is there such service already?

    10x,
    dibau

    dibau naum h

    23 Jul 06 at 6:13 am

  2. The best greasemonkey-script I could find is http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/4855 (I updated the original as it was borked).

    This gm-script isn’t really ideal.
    I think the biggest problem integrating google and delicious is that you don’t search them in the same way. Google has a powerful index (which is not only full-text but incorporates extremely clever analysis algorithms), whereas del.icio.us search is very simple (covering only tags, titles and description) but has the advantage that its organisation is very explicit so I can craft my search terms more carefully (ie. I generally search delicious using tag names that I know I have used), del.icio.us also has a much higher signal-to-noise ratio.

    To get the greatest benefit out of merging these services it would have to be done at the indexing/analysis level and is out-of-bounds for the normal hacker.
    However, since yahoo owns del.icio.us and operates a search engine I can’t imagine having to wait too long for it to happen.

    Gareth Andrew

    24 Jul 06 at 1:04 am

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