delicious search

Before delicious was sold to Yahoo!, I really wanted to see if we could make the delicious search service a major player in the search business. It seemed to me that the best way to keep delicious free to use and free of advertising was to use the data everyone was providing to offer a "people powered" search engine.

Well just take a look at the top drivers of search traffic to this blog in the past monthweek. delicious beats Microsoft and AOL and is not that far behind Yahoo!

Search_traffic

#VC & Technology

Comments (Archived):

  1. Scott Yates

    Interesting that Ask.com is sucking so bad in spite of (because of?) spending all that money on advertising. I wonder if they’ll have a spot in the Super Bowl.

  2. mike hoover

    yes, delicious is a full blown recommendation system. the most valuable out there, in my opinion. i wrote about it here:http://www.michaelhoover.or

  3. zyzhu

    This is very interesting. I am curious where you get the data.

  4. Kamlesh P.

    Long time reader, but first post. The one thing that I don’t think you have mentioned is that from your chart, Google Search (both Web and Image) account for more hits than the other searches put together. In light of that fact, does it matter whether Delicious would be better off separately or being part of Yahoo!?

    1. fredwilson

      I think its clear, in hindsight, that delicious would have been better off as an independent companyFred

  5. John John

    Delicious has so much potential to be a major player in search (Mahalo on steroids?). They’re let down by their poor interface and the lack of attention paid to their interface. Yet another yahoo acquisition left twisting in the wind….

    1. fredwilson

      Agreed

  6. scottfromshanghai

    Very interesting although it clearly shows Google demolishes everyone (even if you add yahoo, Microsoft and del.icio.us!). Huge week on week growth at delicious (+791%) did anything specific happen to cause such a spike?

    1. ifyoumakeit

      While it’s great that you got such traffic from Delicious (I can only dream), it seems premature to claim that the service is now a major traffic driver. If this is indeed week-over-week data, then last week you only saw 270 referrals, which places it below Microsoft, Ask and AOL. Can you share more details?

  7. JT

    This is a little off topic, but have you guys seen this new search engine ManagedQ? I read about it on AltSearchEngines a week ago, and it really kicks ass. There’s probably a bit too young to contribute much traffic to the above list, but unlike Powerset, Hakia and the other new guys they have a compelling pruduct you can try right now. I’d recommend taking a look.

  8. pwb

    So was Delicious below Ask.com the month before?

    1. fredwilson

      Can’t run that query

  9. Maggy Young

    Agree with Bonforte. Hit nail on head here. Delicious can beat Google when you are looking for advice with something. You will get more directly useful sites, not just a stream of links to the topic. You get the bookmarked sites & cut out the dross.

  10. 50m

    People save their bookmarks online (in sites like del.icio.us) and post links to their favorite sites (in sites like digg and reddit). In a way, people that use these sites act as smart agents and add to these big databases the most liked sites on the web. No company could compete with the man hours people put in saving and tagging their bookmarks. No algorithm could calculate site quality better than humans.http://www.50matches.com is in this search evolution junction. We crawl only sites that were bookmarked , “dugg” or “reddit’ed” by combining human indexing with machine indexing. Check us out 🙂

  11. JaeSung Ro

    Hi, FredI think the offering on our public beta is aligning with your thoughts here.With a year long development, Tusavvy has built a new social search engine by using socially annotated web data like public bookmarks and others. It provides concise results using a lexicon built by tags, and rankings selected by social factors like the user’s accumulated interests.I believe you might be interested in exploring it.It would be an honor if you could stop by.http://www.tusavvy.comFor more info.You might want to visit our ‘about’ page as well.http://about.tusavvy.comBest Regards,JaeSung Ro | Founder | zSoup

  12. fredwilson

    BonforteMe too. Joshua is a geniusFred