never made use of the enormous flow of user sharing data they were getting to do anything interesting.
It's a shame they didn't, because many of us users sure did/do. By virtue of its popularity and simplicity, you could know almost every page with any merit was in its system and tagged, making it easy to discover stuff you hadn't even bookmarked yet.
Example: Want a good Python tutorial about threads? http://www.delicious.com/tag/python+threads+tutorial - You can pretty much pull things out of your ass and constantly find gold on there. Yahoo has no spine.
Everyone loves to say "Delicious tags are great data for finding relevant information," but I'm not so sure -- at least for doing keyword queries, compared to web search engines. The right comparison is: is Delicious tagging really better than anchor text from the general Web? "Anchor text" means, the text in or near links pointing to the page. It's like an implicit noisy tagging system the Web provides (if you have a good crawl of it). It's a key component in web search. For example, if you Google for "python threads tutorial" you find nice stuff too.
I did hear a second-hand story about Yahoo web search, for what it's worth. When the Delicious acquisition happened, of course they were super excited for this very reason -- that Delicious should constitute a high-quality dataset (that Google didn't have!) Then they tried all sorts of things to incorporate it into their relevance ranking algorithm, but never could get it to work. I personally think Yahoo search had good relevance algorithm people, and therefore, if you believe this story, that Delicious data is not useful for web search relevance.
So I understand this story might be hard for others to verify. But I think it's reasonable to assume that if the data really was valuable, they would have used it for web search, and someone would have bragged about it at some point -- especially given the large amount of interest from the wider developer and computer science community about how potentially useful the Delicious dataset should be.
The search feature you note is by far my favorite part. Finding good resources on very specific topics can be really hard using google, but delicious has always been an incredibly accurate source for those.
So true. Delicious would always be my go-to place for anything I ever wanted to know about Oracle. For years I'd search delicious before even searching google or metalink. It's a shame that this is being closed.
I so agree. Delicious is one of the most interesting datasets on the internet for precisely the reason you cited: it includes nearly every web page of value that exists, all tagged and linked in endlessly rich ways. I still use Delicious nearly every day for this reason -- despite how slow it is and how badly Yahoo messed it up -- yet I've only ever scratched its surface. There's so much that could be done with it in the right hands. It pains me to think of it going away. Actually, it's tragic.
Why don't they spin it off into a startup? Just open-sourcing the code would be useless and even the data wouldn't hold its value for very long without the application and community continuing. But a startup would have a fighting chance to do something great with it.
They can do what duck duck go does and alter the search results or provide extra info. I agree about the abuse, but linking it to your own delicious account or some algorithm for weighing things that is already used for webpages can surely solve that.
In a way, companies should be in it for the money. That might even have prevented this. Of course, money shouldn't be the only motivator, but in general, companies should aim to make money, very healthy.
Maybe, but I think the only thing that would have been 'prevented' is delicious existing for as long as it did. They've tried to monetize, xmarks tried to monetize, both failed.
It seems possible that maybe social online bookmarking services just aren't profitable at this point in time, and can only exist as a 'public service'.
It seems possible that maybe social online bookmarking services just aren't profitable at this point in time, and can only exist as a 'public service'.
People said that about search in the late 90s. Why Delicious didn't get into advertising is beyond me. With the way everything's tag-based, you'd have had crazy targeting.
Yes, but there's some major differences between bookmarking and searching.
The fact that the majority of users are naturally dependent on searching means there's (obviously) massive exposure to eyes and wallets, and there always has been. Whether that exposure could be turned into profits was what was questioned in the 90s.
Bookmarking is different. I'm going to offend some people here by whipping out my anecdotal evidence: I don't know _any_ non-technical (read: average) users who are interested in maintaining a bookmark library, even if the benefits were explained to them.
On the slim chance that we could somehow convince them that it was worthwhile, I still can't see most of them being interested in browsing tag clouds and bookmark trees of other users, which they would have to do in order to be exposed by this 'ultra-specific' advertising. Anything beyond using it as a regular browser bookmark menu that syncs across computers is pretty unlikely in my opinion.
Why not just check Facebook to see what people are looking at? Or, for the 'geekier' of the mainstream, just check Twitter.
xMarks, a bookmarking service with 2million+ users, in their going away blog post[1] alluded to this same barrier:
> We built it and it put it front of potential advertisers. Many were interested, but ultimately the feedback was negative: our user base was too small to be worth their time and attention.
It needs to be combined with something else. Imagine if hn or reedit knew which pages you like because they host your bookmarks. The homepage could be completely tailored to you, and now users have a reason to visit often and there is advertiser real-estate.
Google has their loss-leader products that exist for the benefit of the online community, but I don't think that this is (necessarily) Yahoo lacking that benevolence.
Let's face it, Google has a lot more capital to back non-profitable products. Yahoo supported Delicious for as long as they could, but ultimately it's hard to justify liabilities like expensive, non-profitable projects to your shareholders.
Google can do it because they've proven that their strategy stuffs the coffers regardless.
Yahoo has no vision, and now they are too busy chasing their own tails with respect to all the bad press they are getting surrounding their layoffs, lack of technology and utter failure in trending technology.
Technology has never been yahoo's problem, they might have more technology than facebook and twitter combined. They had morons running the company for the last 10 years like Terry Semel, Jerry Yang and now Carol Bartz.
I understand turn arounds take time but such decisions are going to lead to nowhere.
Understood, I was referring to their effectual announcement of defeat by dropping any Yahoo search technology in place of BING.
Sure, they have and had technology - yet their utter failure in vision and management has resulted in them losing an understanding / ability to use their tech.
Hmm. OK, I finally 'get' delicious, thanks to that link. That's substantially more powerful and useful than a typical search-results page from Google.
Late to the party as usual...
Edit: Wow. Someone has to take this private. This is one hell of a valuable database. Yahoo must be staffed by gorillas if they're throwing away this kind of data.
It's a shame they didn't, because many of us users sure did/do. By virtue of its popularity and simplicity, you could know almost every page with any merit was in its system and tagged, making it easy to discover stuff you hadn't even bookmarked yet.
Example: Want a good Python tutorial about threads? http://www.delicious.com/tag/python+threads+tutorial - You can pretty much pull things out of your ass and constantly find gold on there. Yahoo has no spine.