Lots of pleasure from the new design already - and it's barely newborn!
One odd thing: search is hugely improved (speed, targeting), but if I search on my own bookmarks there then appears to be no editing function available. I can't, for example, add to a note or add/delete a tag.
I thought I might, for now, be able to work around this by clicking on the linked-to item I wanted to edit, opening the bookmarked page and then running the 'delicious history' check. But, when I do this, my own bookmark of the page in question isn't picked out (it's just somewhere in the stream of users who've also bookmarked it) and when I've found it I can't edit it there either!
Early days, but could these things be attended to? Thanks.
Preoccupations: Yes, we plan to include an "edit" button in search results. It's unfortunately tricky to implement, but it needs to be done. But if you visit the Delicious history page (aka URL details page), there should be a little blue box at the top labeled "My Bookmark", which includes an edit button. Does that happen for you? Or was the box just easy to miss?
rcsmit: Sorting by popularity would rank popular-but-not-very-relevant items at the top. Would this be useful to you?
@Britta. Yes it is deeply interesting to sort basic queries by popularity when you have precise searches on topics you don't know very well. For example, I'd like to know what are the popular bookmarks around "dynamic pricing", not only for the bookmarks tagged "dynamic" and "pricing" (by the way, I can't even know popular bookmarks tagged with "dynamic" and "pricing"). Serge
Britta: I'm not seeing a little blue box labelled 'My Bookmark'. I'll send you a couple of screenshots so you can confirm my eyesight isn't the problem! (It might be.)
"rcsmit: Sorting by popularity would rank popular-but-not-very-relevant items at the top. Would this be useful to you? "
It would be very useful. its not clear how you define "relevance" - populairty is a very easy concept to understand and in many cases would return the most relevant results anyway
Thanks Britta, glad y'all are listening. A search method that would allow the end-user to weed out and sort data by all the factors - recentness, popularity, alpha, etc.. Would be awesome and very powerful. In fact, I'd stay on the delicious site more, versus using google or the in-browser add-ons. As it is now, I rarely visit or use the social aspects of the site because I can't control the search and the tag totals appear to have been gamed by spammers.
@Brutta: Yes it would be very usefull for me. Popularity and relevance have a positive correlation. And above all: I suppose it's possible to make a option "relevance sort" AND a "popularity sort"
I'm surprised that the results returned in a search aren't ordered by popularity!
For example, if you search, say, 'alternative energy', it would find results with both that tags, but it would be logical to get a list of results where the first one is the link tagged the most amount of times. I mean, that's what the "PEOPLE" column lists right?
It seems obvious that getting a result that was tagged 2000 times with 'alternative', and 1000 times with 'energy' is way better that one tagged 100 times with alternative, and 10 times with 'energy', right? Why don't have the most tagged result at the top of the list?
I asked one of our engineers about how we rank results, and here's what he said:
Sorting by number of times an item has been saved sounds great, but works out badly in practice. You end up with every result page being the same:
Yahoo Google Slashdot Delicious etc.
When a site has 10K+ saves, *someone* has gone and used the tag you want to search on (the tail is very long), so that sort is problematic. It might have some corner applications for very specific searches, but in those cases, you probably aren't looking at enough saves for it to be useful. Same thing for dates - you'll just get a list of the earliest uber-popular things saved in delicious.
Ranking by number of times a site has been saved with the particular tag is much more useful, and it's an essential part of the default search ranking, along with a dash of evaluation of the title and notes. That should give you a much more useful metric of popularity in relation to your current search. We're still working on improving this algorithm to give the best possible results, though.
While I think the notion of the D Team knowing what is best for users in terms of weeding out the obvious bad results, I think it is arrogant on the part of the D Team to think that their way is the only way and that offering options is "protection for the masses".
Why can I not make that decision rather than you?
Make the default the "special sauce" version and LET ME HAVE MY SORTING! The obvious bad tags would be obvious and as is the case with all data sets, the anomalies would be obvious to those who are hunting outside of the norm.
There has to be a way to "filter" this kind of information just like there is for all of the other spam laden crap on the web. Amazon and eBay have figured it out .. why can't the DTeam?
tmgstudio: We're actually doing some tests of what popularity sort might look like, to try to understand this better. We're not averse to trying out something that people want. :)
Hello :) I'd like to echo the very first request on this thread -- to allow for editing and deleting of searched items. Britta, thanks for letting us know that the delicious team is working on it; I just want to say that the option is highly anticipated and would be greatly appreciated!
Britta, Thanks for directing me to this page - from http://support.delicious.com/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=304&page=1#Item_0. There has obviously been some in-depth discussion going on already! I was also hoping to find a way to order our bookmarks by the amount of people saving it. This would be hugely useful in our work. We use our Delicious site as a resource page for a large number of staff - our team make a judgement call about each bookmarks content - but having a number of other "users"/number of people saving - could influence our/our staffs enthusiasm to link through to the page. I'm looking forward to hearing how this functionality develops!
Infocentral: Thanks for the suggestion! We are thinking about adding the option to sort your bookmarks by popularity, which would go along with the current options to sort your bookmarks by time and alpha. Adding popularity sort for an account would be simpler than adding popularity sort to search results - since, as discussed in this thread, search results also need to be ordered by relevance to the particular query. This still isn't something we can do right away, but we have it in mind.
I just want to make sure we are all talking about the same thing:
Currently D ranks by relevance for a search If you click on a tag you can sort by "popularity" but this is still not ordered by the # of bookmarks so it must still be using a relevance algorithm
What I think you are all asking for, and what I certainly want, is sort by most bookmarked on both Searches and when you click on a Tag
@Britta, you are saying that the huge sites like Google show up at the top of all of those searches and make it irrelevant. How far down that list do you usualy have to go to see some relevant results, and if its the same 10-20 sites that are the offenders, couldn't those just be filtered out?
The other way to do that would be to use your relevance search to return the X most relevant results, and then sort those by most bookmarked. If the problem is reaching to far down the long tail of tags, then cut it off past a % of relevancy and then sort it.
Re editing of searched bookmarks as per opening thread from Preoccupations and subsequent reply from britta
".......Yes, we plan to include an "edit" button in search results. It's unfortunately tricky to implement, but it needs to be done. But if you visit the Delicious history page (aka URL details page), there should be a little blue box at the top labeled "My Bookmark", which includes an edit button............"
britta, I can't follow what you are saying. Can you elaborate more? I would really like to be able to edit searched bookmarks as I've got 1500 of them to edit!!!
Have sussed out how to get URL history. Unfortunately, it's no good to me as you can only view the URL history for public bookmarks and the ones I've imported from furl are all set as private!!! I would have thought that as I am logged in and they are MY bookmarks, I should be able to get history for ALL bookmarks!! Is there anyway round this? Is there any way of resetting a large number of bookmarks to be shared in one go! Big limitation for delicious when importing large numbers of bookmarks from other systems. Any suggestions?
Jshwaz: Correct, the Popular page for a tag doesn't simply list the most-bookmarked items for that tag - the rankings are partly biased by the number of people who have bookmarked each item recently, among other factors, to make for a somewhat fresher and more dynamic list.
The number of non-relevant bookmarks (and the particular items) at the top of popularity-sorted search results would vary a lot depending on the search query. We would probably do something more like the second part - "to return the X most relevant results, and then sort those by most bookmarked" - but this would also present some weird interface challenges. So, popularity-flavored search isn't impossible, but it's fairly complex and we're thinking about it.
stormykeith: I responded at http://support.delicious.com/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=987&page=2#Comment_6219
I'll echo my interest in having more control over search results. Sorting would be ok, but i think I'd prefer parameters (in the URL of course!):
1) options to return a minimum or max popularity (e.g. &mincite=25 &maxcite=50) 2) "freshness" options to define the bounds using age in days (e.g. &younger=5 and &older=75)
In my humble opinion, to add the option to sort by popularity does not need to be the ONLY sort option - you put it out there, those who like it and/or find it usefull will use it, the rest won't.
This is searching or "school" now if we went by popularity, one of the top entries would be google.com since they have been tagged as "school" at some point. It's highly irrelevant.
We have considered creating this functionality anyway, but it is expensive based on how much data we have and how the indexes are set up.
If we do find an easy to engineer solution we may present it, but we may not. With serving millions of users we need to weight each new feature request with how many people it may impact, both positively and negatively - e.g. for the people who don't wnat to use this, it's another option, in a product that is already somewhat complex.
I explained a little bit about this earlier in the thread too (in case it's easy to miss):
"The number of non-relevant bookmarks (and the particular items) at the top of popularity-sorted search results would vary a lot depending on the search query. We would probably do something more like the second part - 'to return the X most relevant results, and then sort those by most bookmarked' - but this would also present some weird interface challenges. So, popularity-flavored search isn't impossible, but it's fairly complex and we're thinking about it."
I'd like to address something Norfindel said back in August:
"It seems obvious that getting a result that was tagged 2000 times with 'alternative', and 1000 times with 'energy' is way better that one tagged 100 times with alternative, and 10 times with 'energy', right?"
Norfindel:
That makes perfect sense, which is why we do something similar for our relevance search. Relevance ranking is done based on how well your query matches what other people have used to describe the URL, not just how many people saved the bookmark.
The total "people" count (aka, number of saves, or popularity) is a bit misleading. It tells you how many people have saved the link without considering how they've described it.
I wrote a program to do sort-by-saves (aka, popularity or people) as part of my research on the subject. Our current search index isn't well suited to popularity sort, so the program can take several minutes to return its results.
Here are the top results for searches mentioned on this thread. Please let me know if they're good:
I like your how this works in your March 21st post. This is just how we would like to pull popular websites for "tag:education AND tag:science" for example. Is this something we can do from the web/user interface?
Braino, there's something i don't understand: if there are 56137 people that tagged a page located in digg's server with tags education and science, it's very likely that the page had interesting information about education and science. What are the probabilities of 56137 people mistagging the same page? I mean, surely 56137 people didn't tag digg's *homepage* with education and science, right? But a result page in digg's engine.
Also, a search in google about +education +science (http://www.google.com.ar/search?hl=es&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aes-ES%3Aofficial&hs=EnZ&q=%2Beducation+%2Bscience&btnG=Buscar&meta=) returns this, and they just collect the words inside the page, there isn't any human tagging, or likely very little: http://www.ase.org.uk/htm/journals/eis/index.php http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/32122/home?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0 http://www.springer.com/education/science+education/journal/11191 http://portal.unesco.org/shs/es/ev.php-URL_ID=11718&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html http://www.educationscience.com/ http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ies/index.html
Delicious search ranking looks at the concentration of relevant tags, which is what you expect, but we display the total saves count, which is throwing you off.
56137 people bookmarked digg.com, but perhaps only a few tagged it "education" and/or "science". The combined tag cloud for that link matches your query, and it is a popular site, but it's not really relevant to your search.
That's why you'll see sites with fewer saves show up first. According to human tags, they're more like what you're interested in.
Am I getting this right?: if I look for the tags dynamic and pricing in the D search, the first page on top would be the page most tagged dynamic and pricing in the delicious database? cause this is what would be most logical. To rank the pages by how often they have been tagged with the tags i am looking for right? I am not interested if google.com is the most saved page on delicious and maybe 10 users have tagged it "school" right? Why is this discussion so dificult?
+ maybe some people (like me for my work) would like to sort their own bookmarks by #of people who have saved it just to see which are the most saved out of my library without having to go down the whole list which would be veeeeeery usefull (to me) you have discussed this in this thread a while ago and as far as I can see with no results on my interface. An aditional idea would be to see a list of all of MY bookmarks with one specific Tag and sort them by #of people that have saved it. Which I think would be easy to do and with no risk of allways getting google on 1st place (cause I dont bookmark it I can remember that one at least^^).