delicious blog

Aug 6 2009

Delicious Search Gets Even Faster and More Powerful

Last year’s Delicious redesign made Search infinitely snappier and more usable. And after a year of solid use, we’ve thought hard about how we wanted to see the service grow to accommodate user needs and our own wish-list of features. On Tuesday, we launched numerous improvements to Delicious and we are going to review in further detail the search enhancements:

Time Filters

Often, limiting the time-frame of a search can help narrow down your results on a time-sensitive subject. For example, a search for the term tour de france will bring up bookmarks about the race in general. By limiting these results to the last month, you will display more results related to the 2009 tour, and by limiting the results to just one day you’ll find the most up-to-date news in our system.

To use this feature, perform a search as you would normally.  On the resulting page, open the panel beneath the search box (this may already be open) and choose one of the links listed in the right-hand panel, beneath the headline “Bookmarks saved From.”

Delicious Trends Graph

We added a graph to help you visually identify when bookmarks in your results were saved. For example, a search for Michael Jackson will show a large spike in the number of bookmarks saved in the last month or so, following his recent death. A search for The Police will show a large spike in 2006 due to the announcement of their reunion concert, and a subsequent fall off in saves.

Tag Filters

With some search queries bringing in thousands or even millions of results, it’s often difficult to dial-in exactly what you’re looking for using the search term alone. But since most bookmarks on Delicious are saved with tags, you can now filter your results by specifying only those bookmarks that have been saved with, or without, a specific tag. For example, let’s take a search term with a few different meanings: “jaguar”. You could be searching for information on the cat, car, NFL team, the Fender guitar, or the Apple operating system. To narrow your choices down to just the automobile, you can add a positive tag filter to show only those results saved with the tag “car.” This will reduce the number of results relating to the other synonyms.  You could also add a negative tag filter like “NFL”, to show only those bookmarks saved without that tag.

To use the feature, perform a search as you would normally.  On the resulting page, open the panel beneath the search box (this may already be open) and then click a tag filter once to limit the results to those bookmarks saved with that tag, or click it twice to limit the results to bookmarks saved without the tag. The icon beside the tag name will turn green or red to indicate which state the tag-filter is in.  Double-clicking the name of a tag will allow you to edit it, allowing you to create a custom tag filter.

(Tip 2: you can also add a tag filter in the search query box itself. Typing “tag: car” will add a positive tag filter, and “-tag:nhl” will add a negative tag filter.)

Enhanced Search Results

Delicious has made Flickr thumbnails and audio files playable on bookmark lists for quite some time now, but the feature was conspicuously absent from search. We’ve now gone one step further and incorporated enhanced displays for bookmarks from even more sites: Wikipedia, You Tube, Yelp, Yahoo! Local and CitySearch using a Yahoo technology called SearchMonkey.

Search Suggestions

Due to the success of the search-suggestions on the Yahoo! Search engine, we’ve decided to bring that feature to Delicious search. It should allow you dial-in the focus of your query, and help get better results.

We hope these enhancements makes your Delicious search experience more efficient and delightful.  Let us know if you have any feedback in the comments below.

Nathan Arnold  |  delicious.com/nathanyarnold
Chris Draycott  |  delicious.com/chris_draycott

Front End Engineering

Nathan Arnold · nathanyarnold Tags: announcements Bookmark this