deliGoo - to help del.icio.us users

    I set myself del.icio.us in the spring of 2006 and immediately began to densely stuff links to interesting articles and sites that I had encountered along the way. But when, after a couple of weeks, I tried to find a link to the desired article, which (I remember exactly!) I kept in the delishis - I was severely disappointed.

    Inexperience, I kept links, not really caring about the tags accompanying them. I simply chose from the list of popular tags that seemed appropriate. I added my own there, sometimes in Russian, then in English, and sometimes even inserted phrases like “search on blogs” in the tag field. As a result, when I saw my list of tags in del.icio.us, I was horrified. Three-screen sausage, numerous variations of the type “web, web2.0, web”, not to mention all the nice tags “and”, “by”, etc. It is clear that to find something with their help was simply unrealistic.

    I tried using the standard del.icio.us search. And also broke off - I could not find anything with it. Moreover, in many cases I wrote a brief description of the bookmark that was saved, but when I started to search, for some reason it was not the words that I wrote in the description or tags that got into my head, but rather those fragments of phrases and expressions that stuck in my head after reading the article you are looking for.

    At this stage, I had an idea - for such a widespread service as del.icio.us there should be a normal search - not by tags and description, but by the content of the contents of the bookmarks. And I started looking for him. I rummaged through nemeryanno sites with all sorts of gadgets and plugins, which are necessary and not very, but I did not find such a search.

    I had to go back to the beginning - I cleaned the extra tags, added more detailed descriptions to the saved bookmarks (fortunately, there weren’t a lot of them then). He began to take a more discriminating and thoughtful approach to adding new tags. It got better, but not by much. I still could not quickly find the necessary article in order to quote from it.

    The thought of doing a normal search that would be looking specifically for the content of the “embedded” sites and pages did not leave me. In the autumn and winter of 2006, we tried to do this, but it turned out to be not so simple. And only after the new functionality of the Google Custom Search Engine appeared, we made a second, this time successful attempt, which was called deliGoo .

    This thing is done as an add-on, it currently works under IE and FF. Using deliGoo is quite simple and obvious - by default, it offers to search for any word or phrase using del.icio.us's bookmarks. In principle, you can substitute the name of any user there, although it is unlikely that someone might need it :)

    For those who have the order in the tags, you can limit the search area in their bookmarks to a specific tag. But if you do not specify a username, but only a tag, you’ll get something like a specialized search engine on a given topic: deliGoo will select sites saved by all del.icio.us users for this tag , and the search for the necessary words and phrases will be performed only by to these sites.

    For example, it costs nothing in two clicks to make a search engine using the tag "linux" or "iPod" - and then search for the necessary information already in the context of sites of a given topic.

    For popular tags, the process of creating such a custom search engine can take several minutes, but then you can quickly search for any number of queries. At the same time, the work process of deliGoo is optimized, and if a search engine for such a tag has already been created, then the second time the process will go much faster.

    It’s clear that deliGoo does not pretend to take over the world, but we are pleased that we managed to create a really convenient tool for users of the most popular bookmarking service.

    ... and how glad I myself am that I can finally find what I need in my bookmarks! :)

    PS I want to say that I wrote this announcement specifically for Habr, and with selfish interest - I want to ask the hara-people who use del.icio.us to test deliGoo and write down possible questions or bugs found in comments. Thanks in advance to everyone who responds!

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