The major search engine and portal Yahoo.com is in the process of conducting tests aimed at the integration of Delicious (Del.icio.us) social bookmarking data into their search results. This lets searchers know how many Delicious users have bookmarked a particular web page. At present, it only occasionally becomes visible in Yahoo search results. These tests appear to be part of a trend in which Yahoo purchases other popular web sites and takes steps to integrate their content with Yahoo.com functions.

According to searchengineland.com, Yahoo recently began these integration tests; when visible, a line below each search result shows how many Delicious users have “bookmarked” the corresponding pages, along with a short list of “tags” (or keywords) they have been classified with. A small Delicious logo also appears alongside this line of data. Del.icio.us was acquired by Yahoo about two years ago. Yahoo has already completed the integration of itself with another major web site it acquired nine months earlier, by integrating photographs from Flickr.com with their Image Search feature.

The integration with Delicious enables people searching on Yahoo to know the number of people who have recommended a particular web site or page, theoretically helping them to choose the better result. For example, someone could search for a news story on a particular event which happened in the past, then read the article with the highest number of Delicious bookmarks, based upon the assumption that more users would recommend the better article. It could also give searchers a somewhat better idea of how established and/or trustworthy different online retailers are, although it wouldn’t be best to use it as the only source of information for this purpose.

However, there are some potential drawbacks to expanding integration with Delicious beyond tests. Factors unrelated to the quality of web content can impact how often it is recommended, such as how old it is, what percentage of people agree with an opinion it expresses, or how many people have an interest in promoting it. Also, Yahoo is more well-known and has existed longer than social internet bookmarking, so many of its users may be unfamiliar with this concept. It remains to be seen whether searchers will find this useful or cluttered, which will be the most important of tests in determining if integration of Delicious remains a permanent component of Yahoo web search.

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