Yahoo! Makes a Tasty Move

TechCrunch reports Delicious Integrated Into Yahoo Search Results. This could give Yahoo the edge on Google which they so desperately need considering all the bad news for YHOO. I thought they would have made such a move sooner. In 2006, I suggested that Yahoo:

...leverage their del.icio.us property to improve their search product. They could tack on del.icio.us results, much like they've done with answers. Better yet, they could use the collective intelligence of social bookmarking to improve their search relevance algorithm. Google's big breakthrough was PageRank which uses links as a measure of a web page's relevance. Google looks at both the quantity and quality of links and treats these links as, essentially, votes for a site. I think a page bookmarked via del.icio.us could be a better indicator of the importance of a web page than links. Particularly as webmasters have caught on to this idea and links have been gamed to a large degree. If someone views a page as important enough to bookmark, perhaps that's a better "vote" than a link? If Yahoo integrated del.icio.us bookmarks in its search engine algorithm, could the results be more relevant than Google's?

BTW, in case you're not familiar with del.icio.us, try this game to explore the site:

Also, there's a good list out today, 10 Things Yahoo! Search Must do to Become Relevant, by Aaron Wall (one of my favorite bloggers). I think #2 and #9 on that list are very good ideas. I'll add to #9 and suggest they buy a company like Sendori, to take (or keep) more of the parked domain market share out of the hands of Google. At the same time, I still think the 2 suggestions in this post are relevant:

• What Should the New Yahoo! CEO Do First?

Apogee Tags: yahoo, search, yhoo, del.icio.us, google, social bookmarking, game, sendori