Searching & Finding

Okay, so in my haste to get my house packed, I guess I forgot to post this after I'd written it. Chalk one up for the brain being packed along with the contents of the house...

Delicious seems like a wonderful search tool. Rather than having to wade through all the "irrelevant" sites that Google comes up with, I was able to search under my personal faves, "photography" and "photoshop" and come up with some great sites. I can see how using a site like this to search, where it searches by other users tags, rather than keyword, is helpful. Having said this, I need to go back and remember to put tags on all of my bookmarks. I did install the Delicious add on to Firefox, and I wasn't too impressed with how it "hijacked" my bookmarks. I had them all organized into folders, and the new layout of things is taking a bit of getting used to. As an application, however, Delicious is definitely something I will be telling library patrons about. And it would come in very handy when moving around from branch to branch, as your bookmarks travel with you!

Technorati is a tougher one. As someone who is still new to the world of blogging, I still have trouble with the authority of blogs, and therefore don't tend to look to them for information. When I need info I either go to "authoritative websites" (if they actually exist) books or journals for research information, and newspaper or television news sites for current events. If I got more comfortable with blogs, and possibly had more time on my hands to do personal research, I might find this site helpful. I found that different methods of searching on Technorati yielded different types of results. When searching in the "Blog" field, you might come up with a blog that more highly regarded, but only if it was tagged as what you were looking for. Search seemed to rely more on keywords. I guess these two different search types are sort of like Delicious vs. Google. I think depending on the application, either could be useful.