“Social Bookmarks” in FirstStop WebSearch

Let me introduce you to a new search category – “Social Bookmarks”. Many of you have already heard about social bookmarking systems such as del.icio.us, Furl.net, or Spurl.net, which have gained popularity over the past few years. These systems allow you to bookmark web pages, annotate them, and then access your bookmarks from any computer connected to the Internet. And, of course, you can share your bookmarks with other people – that is why they are called “social”. From the web searcher’s point of view, social bookmarking systems are searchable directories of high-quality content - web pages hand-picked and categorized by users of such services. The search results are highly relevant and free from "spam". What can you find by searching social bookmarks? Just think about what kind of pages you usually bookmark yourself. Most likely it will be useful services, interesting articles, or important data. You can find similar things by searching social bookmarks. If you think that you would bookmark a page with information that you are looking for, the chances are that someone else has already bookmarked it. Or will do it soon… The only problem is the number of web pages in the databases of social bookmarking systems. They operate with much fewer pages than major search engines. Nonetheless, the most popular systems, such as Furl.net and Spurl.net, already have several million web pages in their databases. And this number grows every day, even every hour, as more and more people become active users. (By the way, why don’t you sign up with a social bookmarking system, if you haven’t already, and contribute your own bookmarks?) To maximize the benefit of social bookmarks for web searchers and to provide access to a larger number of bookmarked pages, FirstStop WebSearch combines the most popular services into one meta-search category, which allows users to query multiple social bookmarking systems all at once and receive an aggregated list of search results. The pre-installed (in version 4.2) category “Social Bookmarks” contains the following search sources: LookSmart's Furl.net, CiteULike.org, and Zniff.com, a search engine for the Spurl.net. Anticipating your question about del.icio.us, I can tell you that we didn’t include this very popular social bookmarks manager only because it doesn’t have a search facility. A little hint to new FirstStop users: To switch to the “Social Bookmarks” category, choose “Social Bookmarks” from the “Categories” menu. (You don’t have the “Categories” menu? You should upgrade to version 4.2.) About social bookmarking services used in the “Social Bookmarks” category: Zniff.com - "the human search engine". Zniff uses human information from normal Internet users, such as yourself, to find and rank web pages. The results you see on Zniff are from a collection of about 2 million bookmarks gathered by the users of the Spurl.net bookmarking service. Spurl.net is an advanced bookmarking service that allows you to easily keep track of all the information you consume online. Furl.net is a free service that saves a personal copy of any page you find on the Web, and lets you find it again instantly by searching your archive of pages. It's your Personal Web. CiteULike is a free service to help academics share, store, and organize the academic papers they are reading. When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there's no need to type them in yourself. It all works from within your web browser. There's no need to install any special software. Interesting articles about social bookmarks. Social Bookmarking Tools (I): A General Review John Battelle's Searchblog: Grokking Furl: Storage, Search, and the PersonalWeb PassingNotes.com » Interview: Hjalmar Gislason and the egress of Spurl.net The New Wave of Bookmarks