This is my first blog post on The SearchGAP. I hope you will find my blog interesting and share it with others if you do.

One thing that you learn from working in web design is there are a lot of tools that other web developers have created to make our lives easier, but often in large companies, these useful tools don’t get used to their full potential because there are firewalls or company security issues which prevent their use. In this blog I am going to share the topics and tools I find useful.

One of my favourite tools is del.icio.us – or now http://www.delicious.com – With plugins available for both IE and Firefox it’s surprising how people many still don’t really know what it is. Basically “Delicious” is an online bookmarking site which lets you tag all your browser “bookmarks” or “favourites” and store them online where you can keep them for your own private use or make them public to share with others. There are 2 huge advantages of this.

1. You can easily find your bookmarks wherever you are, on your work PC, your mobile phone, or your laptop, or from anywhere in the world from someone else’s computer.

2. You can “tag” each of your bookmarks with your own words which you can use to search through your bookmarks later. For example someone would probably tag my site with “seo” and “blogs” or “search.marketing” and later they would be able to find it by clicking on “seo” or “blogs” in their delicious bookmarks. It is much easier than trying to remember which “Favourites” folder you saved something in.

With lots of users bookmarking sites with their own tags, Delicious is able to index the web based on which words users are tagging a site with and how many users tag a particular site… rather than based on the words in the title tags, page urls, etc… resulting in a “community-based” ranking rather than an algorithmic ranking.

Delicious is actually owned by Yahoo! Google also has its own online bookmarking tool – http://www.google.com/bookmarks/ – which works in a similar way but without the social networking aspect – you can’t find out what the community has bookmarked for a particular word.

There is always debate about how much weight major search engines give to bookmarks on social networking sites, but if their objective is to return relevant results, who better than the users to decide which results are relevant? Although you can’t share your google bookmarks like you can on Delicious, Google obviously has the ability to aggregate users tags and incorporate this in its search algorithm. SEO professionals have different opinions as to how much weight is given to social bookmarks, but one thing for sure, Google definitely keeps an eye on what is happening in this area.

Google has recently been experimenting with allowing users to vote results up or down a search results page when they are logged in to their Google account. There is a good review of this beta-test on Justin Hileman’s blog and more info on Google here. If Google decided to roll this out, it would be another way of socialising web results so they are reflective of what the internet community considers important for a particular search term.

Switching over to an online bookmarking service from your current browser bookmarks is easy as you can import your traditional browser bookmarks. You can then integrate the delicious or google online bookmarks into your browser so that it behaves just like your traditional bookmarks or favourites.

If you are not using an online bookmarking service already you are missing out, especially if you look at a lot of websites.