gHacks technology news » del.icio.us

Google Unified Search

Martin — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 09:02:52 +0000

You need to search on multiple search engines if you truly want to research a search term, as opposed to simply finding a solution to it. Some users might think that searching in Google is enough to find all the relevant information about a search term and while that may be true more often than not it is a good practice to verify that all relevant websites have been discovered by cross-checking in other search engines.

Google Unified Search is a very interesting search add-on for the Firefox web browser. You might have read about add-ons that combine Google search results with those of other search engines such as Bing or Wolfram Alpha. Google Unified Search takes that concept a step further by integrating multiple search engines in Google results. It adds support for Bing, Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, Stumbleupon and Delicious in the Google search results.

Search results of one search engine besides Google Search are displayed at a time but it is possible to switch to the results of another one without having to reload the page. By default Google search results and Bing search results are displayed in the interface. A control in the top right corner makes it possible to switch the alternative search engine to another one.

A left click on a search result in the Google column will open the website as usual. A click on a result in the alternative search engine on the other hand will open the result just in the area of that search engine. Users who want to open the website normally will have to open it in a new tab or window instead.

Google Unified Search is an excellent way of displaying additional information about a search term in the Google search results.

Tags: bing, del.icio.us, firefox, firefox-add on, Google, google search, google unified search, stumbleupon, wikipedia, wolfram alpha

Worio Combines Bookmarking And Web Search

Martin — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 09:36:41 +0000

Worio is a clever mashup of several search engines, social bookmarking and personalization features. At its core stands the feature to add related information to searches performed by the user. Currently Google, Yahoo, Live and an internal search engine are at the user’s disposal. The search results are displayed on the left including their title, description, url and tags associated with the results. The right side makes this interesting to many users. Worio displays related search terms and websites on that side that add quality to the search results.

This functionality is available to all users. Registered users on the other hand can add the social bookmarking component to the mix. A Facebook or Worio account is needed for this. Once the account has been created it is possible to start saving bookmarks which will shape the profile over time meaning that Worio will use that data to display recommendations. If a user tags a lot of operating system, backup software or networking topics then that is what will be recommended primarily to him.

The account creation is a breeze for Facebook users as most data will be imported from there. Another interesting feature is the ability to import bookmarks from Delicious which also works incredibly well. Every page can be added to the bookmarks. If a user chooses to do so a new overlay image appears that displays tag recommendations and options to add or remove tags before saving the site.

A bookmarklet is provided that can be used to tag and add active websites to the Worio profile. The site can also be added to the list of available search engines.

The verdict:

The developers have created an easily accessible bookmarking site that adds to the search experience with its recommendation engine. It does well as a bookmarking site alone but excels when the search is used as well.

Tags: bookmarking, del.icio.us, facebook, Google, live, search, search engine, worio, yahoo

Check your sites delicious bookmark counts automatically

Daniel Pataki — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 12:41:27 +0000

While looking for something completely different I found a handy little tool called Bookmarked Reporter which can parse your site (or use an XML sitemap) and create a report of the delicious bookmark count for all the sub pages. This is great for blogs with many posts, it makes everything easier to track.

Once you have it all set up you can either enter your site URL or enter the location of your sitemap XML. If you use Wordpress the Google Sitemap Generator plugin will create and maintain this file for you, so you can just add the location of that.

You can then generate a report which will take a while, depending on how many links there are. I found this tool handy, but there are many drawbacks. The main one is that it checks del.icio.us, Hatena and Livedoor. Since the developer is Japanese I am guessing it is aimed at the Japanese needs, but delicios is something most of us use, so it’s still handy to have.

The bigger problem I had is that it took me 10 tries to get it to display a report for my blogHack Your Day, which now has 380 links. The bar just froze at a number between 75% and 82% and refused to move. I would like to add however that the actual application did not freeze up, which is something I rarely see.

For those of you who have great big blogs this is a bummer, I mean gHacks has well over 5,000 posts now, that’s just 5,000+ links for the posts, so generation would probably not work at all. Despite all this, I would welcome any additions and improvements as this would be the tool for a lot of bloggers! Also, if you know any similar tools, especially ones with Digg, Stumbleupon and Reddit can you let us know in the comments?

Tags: adobe air, blogging, bookmarks, del.icio.us

Alexa’s What’s Hot on the Web

Martin — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 16:00:34 +0000

Alexa announced a new service a few days ago. Their What’s Hot on the Web service aggregates data from all Alexa toolbar users to provide a list of the hottest, i.e. the most visited, links of users who have the toolbar installed. One could say that it is similar to Digg but with a lesser chance of manipulation and an even greater preference of popular news sites like Yahoo, MSN or The Times Online.

The What’s Hot on the Web currently features three pages with a total of 50 links and links to many empty pages at the bottom which will surely be filled over time. Even more surprising than the empty pages is that the link to page 2 is missing. Visitors can access the homepage which contains the 20 most popular stories “right now” and then head over to page 3 since page 2 is not visible anywhere.

Visiting page three however displays an url that can be manipulated to be able to visit the second page as well. Simply changing the 3 at the end to a 2 will load the second page with the links 21-40.

Alexa’s What’s Hot on the Web provides another nice overview of some of the hottest topics on the Internet currently. It’s basically similar to services like Google Trends, Delicious Popular or even Digg. If you like those kind of sites you will also like this one.

Tags: alexa, amazon, del.icio.us, digg, google trends, popular links, popular websites, trends, website trends

Delicious Not del.ico.us

joshua — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 07:10:04 +0000

It’s been a long time now since Yahoo acquired del.ico.us. Like most Yahoo acquisitions it was a great service and grew rapidly in popularity, but unfortunately was left to stagnate somewhat.

Frankly del.icio.us was one of the founding Web 2.0 services, along with Wikipedia, Amazon and Ebay. It’s the most popular social bookmarking service, even though the social aspects are ignored by many of the users.

For better or for worse it also popularized the web 2.0 URL… full stops are no harder to type then forwards slashes, but it sure feels like it.

Anyway it looks like the new Delicious service will be launching VERY soon. That’s right, del.ico.us has now officially become Delicious, although they’ve had the URL for years now.

Tech Crunch posted some screenshots a while ago which showed the new service to be pretty impressive, a complete code re-write, a cool new theme and interface and a stack of new features.

Apparently scalability was an issue which has held up the release for a year now. Ironically it was also the initial reason for the complete re-write.

Anyway, with the official blog providing assurance that “After months of work, the new Delicious is almost ready to come out of the oven” it may very well be true this time.

When it launches you’ll be automatically logged out of your account. I hope you guys will be able to handle this…

Personally, while an update will be nice, I never use del.icio.us through the web interface. I use it purely as a way to store my bookmarks online, no friend sharing, no visiting the homepage nothing. Flock 2.0 has awesome integration with del.cio.us and that’s how I use it.

Tags: bookmarking, del.icio.us, yahoo

Import Delicious Bookmarks into Firefox

Martin — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 11:19:50 +0000

Just a few days after realizing that the new Stumbleupon Toolbar had the function to save every new website that is stumbled as a Firefox bookmark and that it provided the option to import all (older) Stumbleupon sites into Firefox I literally stumbled upon a similar solution for Del.icio.us users.

Del.icio.us is a online bookmarking service where users can add websites to. A small description and tags can be added to those websites and an account is required to store them online.

To import all Delicious bookmarks into Firefox do the following. Head over to Delicious and select settings > export/backup to save all bookmarks in an html file. Make sure to include the tags. A click on Export To HTML starts the process.

Now export all bookmarks of Firefox 3 as a JSON file as well. This can be done in Bookmarks > Organize bookmarks and there by clicking on the Import and Export button.

Now that you have both files saved go to the website that combines both bookmarks and merges them so that only one bookmark file is left in the end that can be imported into Firefox again. The new file is in JSON format as well, the format that is the default Firefox format for storing bookmarks. The import of that merged bookmarks file is done in the same menu as the export mentioned above.

Tags: bookmarks, del.icio.us, favorites, firefox, firefox tips

How Webmasters use social sites to create a keyword monopoly

Martin — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 08:12:46 +0000

The regular user thinks that if he searches for a keyword in Google he will receive a listing of ten different websites that are the best matches for the keyword entered. This common believe is wrong. Clever marketers have found ways to make their website appear in all of the search results on that page or at least in many of them.

We have two different approaches though. The first is to get a so called double ranking. If two pages of a website are on the same results page the lower ranking one gets moved just below the higher ranking one. If you have the number 1 spot the lower ranking one will get the number 2 spot even if it would only qualify for number 9 or 10.

That’s two spots of ten already. What happens if you submit a site to a social news or bookmarking website ? Right, it gets a new entry in the search engines that points to the original url that the marketer wants to promote. Many social sites like Digg have such a high standing at Google that their results are often seen in the top 10 or 20 if you search for a keyword.

There is another way that is currently possible. Google treats subdomains as if they were different domains. Marketers create keyword rich subdomains that are pushed in the search engines as well. So, even if you expect to see 10 different results the reality could be different.

Tags: del.icio.us, digg, seo, social-bookmarking, webmasters

Manage your Delicious Bookmarks locally

Martin — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 22:04:23 +0000

Delicious is a nice website to discover new interesting websites. I was however never that fond of using it to store my own bookmarks but for the reason to promote my websites to a large audience. If I want a way to store bookmarks I rely on my browser and not a website that does that for me. Call me old fashioned but that’s how I think about this.

If you happen to use Delicious regularly you might find Netlicious [homepage, via Freeware Genius] very helpful. Users can use it to manage their delicious bookmarks locally which includes editing posts. The application requires the Microsoft .net framework so make sure you have that installed. Once that is out of the way you provide your Delicious username and password during the start of Netlicious.

All of the bookmarks of that Delicious profile are downloaded and displayed in a matter of seconds, very fast and nice. The left pane contains all the tags that have been used to describe bookmarks, the upper right pane contains the posts that are associated with the selected tag and the lower right pane contains a preview of the page.

The preview pane can be disabled if you do not need that one. The edit function is available after right-clicking a tag or a bookmark. If you right-click a tag you can change the name of the tag while a right-click on the bookmark makes it possible to edit the title, url, the tags, notes and private status.

Posts can be deleted as well or opened in the default browser of the system. One nice feature is the option to export the bookmarks either in html or xml format. If you save them in html format you gain a clickable list of all of your stored bookmarks. Could come handy.

Tags: bookmarks, del.icio.us, social-bookmarking, software, Windows

Yahoo integrating Delicious into search results

Martin — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 19:43:56 +0000

Just got word that Yahoo Search has started integrating information from Del.icio.us into their search result pages. Yahoo aquired Del.icio.us some years ago and I was wondering since then when they would start to combine the two online services to offer their visitors additional information.

If a site has been bookmarked at Delicious it is shown in the Yahoo Search Results pages. The number of users who have bookmarked it as well as the main tags that have been used to bookmark it are shown. A click on the number of users who bookmarked a link using Delicious leads to the bookmark at Delicious while a click on any of the tags mentioned opens the tag listing at Delicious which does not necessarily mean that the website is listed on that website.

I think that this is a nice idea to integrate Delicious into Yahoo. It could give users confidence that the website that they are going to visit has been useful for other users because of the bookmarks at Delicious. I would not like to see a integration of the amount of bookmarks in the search results because it is not a huge problem to get hundreds of bookmarks at Delicious for a small amount of money.

The cheapest offer that I was able to find was to pay $5 for 50 bookmarks at Delicious. Yahoo should take this into consideration.

Tags: del.icio.us, search engine, yahoo

Add Delicious Bookmarks to Firefox

Martin — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 08:16:47 +0000

Simple Delicious is a Firefox add-on which displays a users delicious bookmarks in Firefox. We all know that it can be quite useful to use a service like Delicious to store all of your bookmarks on the web to be able to access them from anywhere. Webmasters use this service as well to promote links from their own websites.

While the service is nice if you are on the road it does not make much sense if you are working at home using your own computer. It’s not really comfortable to go to Delicious, login and search through your bookmarks or tags to find the one that you are looking for.

A far better way is the Simple Delicious add-on which creates a new entry in the Firefox menu giving the user access to all of his bookmarks after supplying his login details. The bookmarks from Delicious are synced afterwards and sorted by tags which means that it will look crowded if you are one of those users who use lots of tags for every bookmark.

I guess it works best if you use one or two tags for every bookmark that you save at Delicious. You should note however that if you do use more than one tag that the bookmark will appear more than once in the list. So, the best way would be one tag for each bookmark.

I decided to create a new account just for this purpose because I have been using five and more tags per bookmark that I saved at Delicious.

Read More:

Simple Delicous

Tags: bookmarks, del.icio.us, firefox, mozilla

Fichey Digital Microfiche

Martin — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 07:05:14 +0000

Fichey finally offers a new approach for the crowded web 2.0 community by giving everyone access to the back catalogue of popular social news and bookmarking websites such as Digg, Delicious and Stumbleupon. This is just one approach of Fichey but the most important one.

A sweat little object is popping up in front when you visit Fichey and you can use that to take a look at all the sites that were popular at those websites in the past. Since Fichey is relatively new you can only access sites that were popular beginning with July the 6th of 2007.

Every site that was popular in the past is opened in the same browser tab which means that you browse one site at a time and can flip through them. It looks like Ajax was used to create the effect, looks pretty nice. Pretty good way to flip through many popular sites in a very short period of time.

Tags: del.icio.us, digg, fichey, popular sites, stumbleupon, web 2.0

10 must-see Opera Widgets

Martin — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 21:05:52 +0000

Firefox has its extensions, Internet Explorer its plugins and Opera has Widgets. They basically mean the same: addons for your browser of choice that add functionality to it. I don’t think that Opera deserves to take the third place in the ongoing browser war, it’s fast and resource friendly and many users who rely on Firefox or Internet Explorer should at least take a look at it and evaluate it for themselves. They might be surprised about Opera after all.Widgets for Opera come in all colors and shapes and you can compare them pretty much to the excellent list of extensions that are available for Firefox.

The major difference is how they add the functionality. Widgets for Opera usually open in their own window (like a mini sized popup) and one can opt to have the widget always on top. This means that they stay on top even if Opera is minimized. I actually prefer to browse the Opera website for Widgets because it looks much cleaner and professional than the one for Firefox. Not a fan of the windows marketplace at all. All widgets are free to download which is another similarity that Opera and Firefox share. Enough of the babbling, here is the list of 10 must-see Opera Widgets.

Video Downloader – lets you download videos from many video sites including youtube. It is a little bit different from the Firefox extension with the same name. This Video downloader opens a small popup and requires you to paste a link of the video into it. It displays the download link afterwards.
Gmail Checker – displays a very small icon with the amount of mails currently unread in your inbox. Can be moved around any way you like.
Image Grep – nice widget that makes it possible to search flickr, google and yahoo for tags and keywords specified. Displays the results neatly in its windows. F5 refreshes the results, a double-click loads the image in Opera.
Mini Del.icio.us – this one is fantastic. It ask for a del.icio.us username at first start and offers a quick and easy way to load any bookmark of that user.
gCalendar – read only Calendar that pulls data from Google Calendar. Great for the quick overview.
Bug Me Not – Users submit general passwords to the Bug me not database and everyone else may use those passwords to visit the website and read content that is for members only. Just enter a url and the widget searches the bug me not database and displays the results.
Pandora Radio – displays the Pandora radio in the widget window. Easy and fast access to your radio stations.
Digg Frontpage – displays the frontpage news of digg.com
Fark Frontpage – similar widget that displays news of fark.com
Bittorent – searches many torrent search engines, displays result in the widget.

Tags: addons, browser, del.icio.us, digg, fark, firefox-extensions, opera, plugins, widgets

Use Onlywire to drive traffic to your website

Martin — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 10:30:36 +0000

I’m normally not writing that many articles with webmasters in mind but I sometimes come upon a remarkable service or site that I like to much that I have to write about it. We all know that webmasters use Social Bookmarking websites such as del.icio.us to bookmark and tag their own articles to drive traffic to their website. This is working well in conjunction with buttons that let visitors of the site add the same article to those bookmarking sites increasing the popularity of the article.

I never had the time and passion to submit my articles to many bookmarking sites and only submitted it occasionally to the most popular services. That is, until I found the site onlywire which handles most of the submitting process for me. I had to signup for the service – it is free of course – and provide login details for all the social bookmarking services that I wanted to combine. I then had to drop a bookmarklet into my browser bar and click on it whenever I was on a page that I wanted to submit to all of the services that I supplied login details for.

I’m using Onlywire to submit every article that I write to 15 bookmarking services with a single mouse click. This is pretty efficient and I can already notice some traffic that is coming from several of the services. The only other step is to supply tags for the article in question which will be used to categorize the article at the social bookmarking services.

source: monetizr

Tags: bookmarks, del.icio.us, diigo, drive-traffic, furl, onlywire, social-bookmarking, webmasters

Check your del.icio.us bookmarks

Martin — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 14:33:40 +0000

Checking the bookmarks that I saved at del.icio.us was a boring and long lasting task until I found the little java application called fresh del.icio.us which automatically checks the bookmarks that are stored in an account. You do need the java virtual machine to execute the jar file. After that you only have to supply your login and password to del.icio.us and click on the Fresh button.

All bookmarks in that account at del.icio.us will be analyzed and added to a list of bookmarks. A green background color means that the link is correct and working, a red one that an error happened while trying to connect to the website. This does not necessarily mean that the link is broken. It could mean that the site is currently down for instance.

A view only filter displays only certain bookmarks if activated. It is possible to set the filters that way that only links are displayed that were not working at the time of the check. A manage wrong posts button makes it easy to delete erroneous bookmarks after x tries of connecting to the server.

source: genbeta (Spanish)

Tags: bookmarks, del.icio.us, favorites

gHacks technology news » del.icio.us

Google Unified Search

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