Earlier in the year, we posed the question, “are social bookmarking sites better at search than Google?” At the time, some people thought they already were. Our conclusion then was that social bookmarking data was better suited to augment or enhance traditional search results or rankings, not act as a main source on their own. We also noted that they generally seemed to perform best with technology related queries, because their users were skewed toward those who work in technology.
It would appear that the latter has not changed much over the past seven months. Yesterday, Yahoo! released the top 10 del.icio.us tags for 2007, and with they exception of “music” at #4 and “travel” a #8, they are exclusively related to technology (with slight license taken to include “photography” and “games” in with the tech crowd). Below is the full list:
- Design
- HDTV
- Games
- Music
- Web 2.0
- Video
- Ubuntu
- Travel
- Photography
- Mac
While the list did include search staples like video, music, and travel, the inclusion of a Linux distribution as the 7th most tagged item of the year is telling: del.icio.us is still not mainstream. Notably absent, of course, are tags about celebrities/gossip, sports, health, and major world news items. Those sort of things, which are massively popular each year among mainstream searchers, need to be present before anyone can seriously start to think about social bookmarking sites as a good basis for a search engine.
Of course, for those who wish to try, you could check out deliGoo (review) or 50 Matches (review).
