Social bookmarking seems like it should be a great way to browse the web. The web is exactly that- an untamed and confusing mass of tangled information that is all but impossible to navigate. Collaborative bookmarking allows for users- people just like me- to add helpful descriptors to websites and allows those sites that are most tagged with a certain word to rise to the top and become findable. This tool is useful for everyday users or institutions or libraries (as we have seen).
However, the reality is that searching the web using del.icio.us is not better than searching on engines like Google. The lack of helpful or reliable descriptions makes searching on del.icio.us reliant only on page titles and tags. Additionally, searching for multi-word ideas yields almost no relevant results. For example, searching "weddings" in either Google or del.icio.us will bring up some good sites for those wanting information on weddings. However, searching "cheap weddings" on del.icio.us yields some results about weddings and some results that are cheap, such as cheap airfare. A search on del.icio.us often brings up results without the search words as tags or in the web page title. This seems to be a problem more with the search interface or algorithm, but the results are the same. Del.icio.us is not a place to search the web. For users who are just browsing, it may be useful, but not much more useful than old-fashioned web surfing.
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