Dec 18 2008

The state of the Delicious hive mind in 2008

I talk to a lot of people who use Delicious — on the forum, by email, on Twitter, and more — so I have a sense of what individuals think about the service, but I thought it’d be fun to check out what large numbers of people do on Delicious when they’re not asking for new features, reporting bugs, or praising the arrival of bulk edit. Let’s see!

Here are people’s top ten searches on Delicious for 2008, with some commentary:

  1. news — Along with the usual faces such as BBC News and CNN, Delicious likes Slashdot, Digg, and a visualization called Newsmap.
  2. blogs — These results contain a variety of lists and tools for people who want to find more to read or want to write their own blogs, including The Hype Machine and Edublogs.
  3. reference — People find Delicious useful as a practical source of knowledge, hooray. Delicious users betray their nerdiness by providing specialized resources for programming and web design for many of these results.
  4. wiki — Several of these results are for wiki software (which makes sense, since deciding on a software package might be the hardest thing about starting a wiki), but one of them is Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki, which looks like a handy reference.
  5. restaurants — Guides for New York, London, and everywhere. Sounds good to me.
  6. hotels — Most of these results are useful for cost-effective comparison, but a lot of Delicious people have also bookmarked Unusual Hotels of the World, Design Hotels, and Unique Hotels for Global Nomads.
  7. css — Delicious’ slight geeky bias means that searching for a technical topic gets you the best tutorials, documentation, and tips. And luckily, people searching for CSS probably aren’t looking for anything else.
  8. web 2.0 — What do people want when they search for this? I’m not sure, but they can find all kinds of things, from a how-to design style guide to The Machine is Us/ing Us. See also our 2005 blog post that attempts to answer what is web 2.0?
  9. artists — Delicious’ taste ranges across places to find out about artists (the-artists.org), places to buy and sell work (Etsy), and places where you can find drawings by my friends (deviantART), along with blogs and artists’ organizations.
  10. music — I figure people are looking for new music here, and they can find a lot of it, from Pandora to Last.fm and Musicovery, and if their searches lead to bookmarked mp3s, they can use the built-in Delicious media player to listen right away.

These may seem like normal informational searches, but the results are useful because those sites have all been judged good by many thousands of people like you and me (out of the millions who use Delicious). A little more character comes out in the list of the next ten top searches: facebook, games, photoshop, iphone, photography, nightlife, diy, apple, science, and firefox.

If you use the Delicious Firefox addon, you can switch your top-right search box to Delicious and search like this all the time:

Screenshot of search

Britta Gustafson · britta Tags: chatter Bookmark this

35 Comments Add your own

  • Michael  |  Dec 18 2008 at 12:16 pm

    Thanks, Britta, you’ve given me a stack of useful bookmarks and a new way of appreciating Delicious. Best, M.

  • The AboutUs Weblog »&hellip  |  Dec 18 2008 at 3:21 pm

    […] noticed this list earlier today when ReadWriteWeb posted their thoughts which rightly notes that Delicious’ Top 10 Searches 2008 (news, restaurants, etc) aren’t necessarily pointing to the best results for what searchers […]

  • Jack  |  Dec 19 2008 at 12:04 am

    Very good and external estimate.　All list above are the 2008 most popular element in the IT.

  • rubbercat  |  Dec 19 2008 at 2:36 am

    5 updates in 2 weeks??? what’s going on here???

  • IndianSEO123  |  Jan 3 2009 at 5:08 am

    Thanks, Britta, you’ve given me a bunch of useful links of bookmarks thanks…IndianSEO123

  • Ashley  |  Jan 4 2009 at 11:49 am

    Do you have an ETA on when an Add-On will be released for Google Chrome?

    I want to switch to the Google Chrome browser, but I’m not willing to give up such seamless integration of del.icio.us with my web browsing (so, props to you for a product I don’t want to live without).

    Thanks.

  • Britta Gustafson  |  Jan 5 2009 at 7:13 pm

    Ashley: Chrome doesn’t yet have a way to make third-party add-ons, but we’re watching to see if that happens in the future. You can still add bookmarklet buttons to Chrome for simple bookmark saving. Glad you like Delicious!

  • Flug  |  Jan 20 2009 at 4:18 am

    I expected music to have a higher position on your list, as I think many people are searching for music and therefor use delicious. But maybe I just draw conclusions about others based on myself.

  • Kourosh  |  Jan 24 2009 at 4:54 am

    Hi,
    I want to inform you that feedburner can not read Delicoius feed anymore. Both old and new RSS.
    Thanks

  • Coren  |  Jan 28 2009 at 4:19 pm

    Is the server down or something? I can’t access my bookmarks; yahoo is saying the page can’t be found.

  • Andrew  |  Jan 28 2009 at 4:24 pm

    Yes, down for me too.

  • Aaron Mayzes  |  Jan 28 2009 at 4:26 pm

    It seems to be down for lots of people. See http://search.twitter.com/search?q=del.icio.us+OR+delicious.com

  • Smarmy  |  Jan 28 2009 at 4:27 pm

    Hey I don’t mean to freak out or anything but WHERE IS DELICIOUS???

  • Tamara  |  Jan 28 2009 at 4:28 pm

    Yes, down for me too. I’m using Google Chrome, yet it bounces to Yahoo (not even my default search) telling me “page doesn’t exist”. I can search it up on Yahoo - but when I click on the link, I still get the same message. Most annoying. I also can’t link from this page. Same message.

  • satja  |  Jan 28 2009 at 4:28 pm

    I can’t access my bookmarks using the URL; yahoo is saying “Sorry, the page you requested was not found” :(

  • alucardi  |  Jan 28 2009 at 4:36 pm

    It is back. The service is running again. Thanks D!
    I was a bit concern for a while.

  • Tamara  |  Jan 28 2009 at 5:11 pm

    Still down for me on Google Chrome. It’s available when I use my Firefox browser. Is it a GoogleChrome issue?

  • Dave Dash  |  Jan 28 2009 at 6:31 pm

    As noted here: http://support.delicious.com/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=1944&page=1#Item_0

    We had a blip, (human error on our end), but we’re back.

    Tamara, should work in Google Chrome as well.. perhaps its caching something… I’m on a mac and can’t check GC at the moment.

  • Fanblogger  |  Jan 30 2009 at 1:28 am

    Thank you for the information, i´ll try to use delicious…

  • usd6  |  Jan 31 2009 at 12:30 am

    Thought it was heading to see what delicious food ha ha, this is really a brand-new look at the issue in perspective, and thank you for the article, write a good thank you!

  • Free PPC Seach Engine  |  Feb 10 2009 at 10:29 pm

    We thought Delicious is for bookmark but base on the info above - it become a focus search engine.

    Yes, some were really searching for very specific topics on Delicious.

    Delicious Rocks!

  • Pronostic Fotbal  |  Feb 15 2009 at 9:30 am

    Searching Everybody’s bookmarks for: VIDEO in delicious.com lhas 1841432 results comparing with MUSIC which has 1801374 results (February 15, 2009). I can say that #10 could be VIDEO.

  • Lorenzo  |  Feb 15 2009 at 9:54 pm

    Why cant we sign in with yahoo IDs yet? This is a huge pet peeve of mine because I’m tired of so many site registrations. i’ve got enough accounts online.

  • Britta Gustafson  |  Feb 16 2009 at 12:20 am

    Lorenzo: We’re working on making it possible to log in with your Yahoo! ID. We just have to be careful and thoughtful about how we do this, since we know that some existing Delicious users would prefer to sign in with their Delicious ID.

  • ramakrishna  |  Feb 16 2009 at 12:25 am

    earlier i used to visit delicious just to bookmark my sites, but now i visit to search for some information as well..Delicious is more than a bookmarking site now…

  • miguel  |  Feb 25 2009 at 1:25 pm

    Thanks, Britta, and congratulations for the excellent work done up to now.
    After struggling for a long time with a solution for my research, bookmarks and rss, I recently moved all my bookmarks ( some 2700 ) to Delicious.
    I like the design simplicity and web UI, the excellent add-on for firefox and the RSS and REST interfaces.
    However, I think Delicious could easily provide a much better tool for the so-called ’semantic web’, only by proposing a tag naming convention and trying to convince users to adopt it. Maybe even a users group could be assembled for promoting this convention, which would be always not-mandatory.
    I’d involve myself in such a project …
    Of course, some distinction could be provided for tags included in a central thesaurus or not.
    And some form of conversion from these to those could be automatically programmed with appropriate algorithms.
    This could be the very next step to Wikipedia in making a huge world-wide knowledge-base. And a excellent starting point for the next-generation search engines ( Yahoo will appreciate !).
    Last, but not the least, I have one more suggestion: Delicious deserves a much better search tool for the power-users, and I believe direc.tor is on the right track … DRY … buy them, debug, improve and that’s it !

  • Lauren  |  Feb 26 2009 at 5:57 am

    hey everyone, this is cool.

  • A UK Website Designer  |  Feb 27 2009 at 3:27 am

    This is a really useful post, we’re constantly interested in what people are searching for in order to generate new web based ideas, and this list has provided a really useful insight. Thanks.

  • Britta Gustafson  |  Mar 2 2009 at 9:23 pm

    miguel: You might be interested in this thread: The Art of Tagging: conventions and strategies — here’s one thing I said there:

    “One issue I see with building a way for people classify their tags like that: I imagine only a minority of people would be interested in doing it. Many people like to just tag their bookmarks and move on to doing other things, and they probably wouldn’t want to go through and carefully map out meanings for their tags. I think some kind of automatic tag cluster-detecting might help more.”

  • robert poslusny  |  Mar 3 2009 at 8:59 am

    I just signed up for ypur service . I am very pleased to be on yahoo internet service.thank you keep up good work.

  • Carl Parisien Natick MA  |  Mar 15 2009 at 2:41 pm

    I also signed up recently. I cant say enough. Keep up the good work

  • Frogman  |  Apr 18 2009 at 5:21 pm

    Some How I downloaed Delicious and it’s set as default search and I can’t change it…can you Help?

  • Britta Gustafson  |  Apr 19 2009 at 11:06 pm

    Frogman: If you’re using Firefox, you should be able to click the little Delicious logo on the left of the search box and then select your preferred default search engine.

    If that’s confusing, or if you’d rather uninstall the Delicious add-on completely, here are the instructions:

    A. To uninstall the Internet Explorer buttons, go to Add or Remove Programs and uninstall “Delicious Add-on for Internet Explorer”.
    B. To uninstall the Firefox add-on, go to Tools → Add-ons and click the “uninstall” button for the Delicious Bookmarks add-on.

  • Trevor Phillips  |  Jun 6 2009 at 9:44 pm

    Congradulations on all that you do. Stay positive no matter what the outcome may be .

  • Erik  |  Jun 14 2009 at 7:38 am

    Hey y’all:

    Very interesting stuff, and I must say I also use it for recipes as a day to day thing.

    Not to self-advertise, but I used to work as an employment counselor, and I’m trying to use Delicious to compile the largest resource of job sites for folks looking for work. Check me out at readrightresume.

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