deliGoo Mashes Google with del.icio.us
deliGoo is a nifty new add on for Firefox 2.0+ and IE 6.0+ that mashes up del.icio.us with Google Custom Search. The way it works is by creating a Google Custom Search engine based on all of a user's del.icio.us bookmarks, all of the bookmarks under a single tag …
Context & Ripple Effects
Read/WriteWeb's deliGoo write-up lands mid-2007 mashup season, when third-party developers were routinely recombining Google properties with social data — Read/WriteWeb had already tracked the same instinct applied to maps in Webware's coverage of Google Maps mashups. What distinguishes this entry is that the underlying dataset is personal: your own del.icio.us bookmarks become the corpus of a Google Custom Search engine.
The timing is notable for del.icio.us itself, which was under active scrutiny that summer — a July 2007 usability lab examined its interface just two months before this. deliGoo treats the bookmark service not as an end product but as raw material for search, which is exactly the kind of third-party dependency Yahoo's newly acquired property would have to weigh.
First-order effects
- Users of Firefox 2.0+ and IE 6.0+ gain a scoped search tool: queries run only against pages they have bookmarked, or against all bookmarks filed under a single tag, rather than the open web.
- deliGoo demonstrates that Google Custom Search's engine-building can be automated entirely by a client-side add-on, with no cooperation required from either Google or del.icio.us.
Second-order effects
- Bookmarking services acquire a second utility beyond retrieval of saved links — their tag structures become queryable indexes, which raises the strategic value of the data for whoever owns it, i.e., Yahoo with del.icio.us.
- Other add-on developers get a template for wrapping Google Custom Search around any public bookmark corpus, pressuring first parties to ship comparable scoped-search features natively.
Third-order effects
- If personal and tag-scoped corpora keep proving useful as search indexes, search begins fragmenting from one universal web index toward many scoped engines layered on user data — with control of the underlying dataset, not the search algorithm, becoming the differentiator.
- Third-party tools like deliGoo sit entirely on borrowed infrastructure (Google's index-building, del.icio.us's data), illustrating how fragile mashup-layer businesses are when either platform changes terms — a structural risk for the whole add-on ecosystem.
The trend: Social bookmarking data is being repurposed as the backend for scoped custom search engines, part of the broader mashup-era shift in which user-generated collections become search indexes in their own right.