Del.izzy is a search engine that supplements the search options available at Delicious. I use Delicious every day and for a lot of bookmarks and I am always looking out for ways to extract useful information from my treasure trove of bookmarks.

Del.icio.us is a great service, but their search options leave something to be desired. When you search through your bookmarks, you are only searching through tags, titles and descriptions, not the page content.

Del.izzy is a simple, web based search tool that lets you search through all content, including title, description and page content, for all your bookmarks. It works fast and you can choose how many search results you want displayed.

Del.izzy is still in beta and it is clear that they haven’t spent big money on sleek web design, widgets and other Web 2.0 stuff. But it works well and meets a real need.

Here are some of the search related articles we have found interesting lately:

• Google Offers Up Gears Geolocation API To Make Web Sites Location Aware

  Google thinks it would be valuable to have any Web site you visit — whether on your phone or PC — know where you are. (Information Week Aug 22 2008)

• Google’s speech-to-text technology is huge search advance

  A new speech-to-text technology from Google in which you type in a word or a phrase and it searches through YouTube videos to find all the instances where someone said it. (Stamford Times undated Aug 2008)

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I do most of my work on Macs and most of my surfing I do in Firefox. One of the main reasons I use Firefox is that with its huge choice of add-ons it is highly customisable. But there are some valueble add-ons for Safari as well, for instance Inquisitor, a search plug-in.

How it works

Inquisitor replaces the current search bar functionality in Safari with a search drop down menu.

According to David Watanabe, who developed Inquisitor, it is like Spotlight for the web: Start typing and websites pop up immediately, along with suggestions to refine your search. Click on a suggestion for a refined search and by default a page with Yahoo search results will open. (Spotlight is the search engine included in the MacOS.)

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Phil Bradley presents various online automatic tools for ascertaining the monetary value of web sites over at his blog.

The tools try to determine the value of domains or web sites by combining information like back links, the age of the domain name, Alexa ranking etc.

It is a long time since we tested them, and we were of course eager to know whether we can sell Pandia and retire to the Bahamas.

Smart PageRank told us that Pandia is worth US$ 1,330. This is, to put it bluntly, very disappointing.

Cubestat has a slightly more positive view of our site’s commercial potential: US$ 26,293.

We choose to believe that dnScoop is the most accurate of the three, simply because it values our site at US$ 143,704! Now we are talking!

Find out what’s on US TV by searching Ask.

Not all search engine improvements have to be groundbreaking. Several baby steps may ultimately become a large step for mankind…

Well, let’s not get carried away here.

It is a fact, though, that Ask has not yet given up the attempt at attracting new users through innovation. That’s a good thing, as big companies like Google and Yahoo! need competition to keep on innovating themselves.

Ask already has the best search result page layout on the planet. Now they have added separate TV program listings to the search results.

In the Ask blog they say that:
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Greg Notess reports in Online that Yahoo! no longer has full support for Boolean.

Boolean is a search syntax used for composing more complex queries in search engines. (See out Goalgetter tutorial for an introduction).

Now the NOT operator is gone in Yahoo!, and searchers will have to stick to the “search engine math” operator to achieve the same effect. Put a minus-sign directly in front of a term that you want excluded from search result (meaning that Yahoo! will exclude pages that has that term in their text).

Yahoo! has also dropped support for the AND operator. This is not equally serious, as Yahoo! will do an AND search by default.

The OR operator still works, but nesting with parentheses fails.

Yahoo! has apparently come to the conclusion that since so few uses Boolean anyway, they may as well not support it. That is a mistake. Power-users like librarians, journalists and researchers use them, and they are exactly the kind of people that influences the public opinion in these matters.

Bring back Boolean, Yahoo!

Google still accepts the most popular Boolean terms, and Exalead even supports the NEAR operator. Still, as Notess says: “Live Search is now the only major search engine with full Boolean support.” Hm. Interesting. In this area Microsoft is the search engine winner!

I use every opportunity I get to talk about all the data available at bookmarking sites like Delicious and I often wonder why more search tools don’t utilize this wealth of information.

InSuggest is a Swedish company specializing in personalized web recommendations. This summer they launched a service based on Delicious.

InSuggest has had a service for recommending web sites based on URLs you provide. They also have a similar service for suggesting images. Their new tool doesn’t require you to type in URLs to get recommendations. All you have to do is add your Delicious user name.

InSuggest loads your bookmarks in one column, your tags in another and list recommendations in a third.

The recommended sites are represented by a thumbnail, a title, a URL and some tags. The interface is easy to navigate and it looks sleek and cool.

If, like me, you have a large number of bookmarks in disparate categories, refining your recommendations by tag will provide more interesting results. You can even combine tags for more advanced Queries.

Is it any good?

InSuggest is fun to use and the recommendations are mostly good.

However, only part of my tags were displayed, which made filtering by tag less than optimal.

And tags like social_networking are split, so I’m left with “social” and “networking”. It’s still a lot of fun, though, and once these bugs are fixed, InSuggest will be a great tool.

Here are some of the articles we have found interesting this week:

• Big Update to Webmaster Tools

  Live Search has launched a significant update to the Webmaster Center and brought the Center out of Beta (Live Aug 6 2008)

• Has Google Blocked WebPosition Ranking Software for Good?

  Google has finally closed its doors on one of the most popular search engine ranking software (PageTraffic Aug 7 2008)

• How to start a multilingual site

  Advice from the Official Google Webmaster Blog (Aug 7 2008)

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