Are social bookmarking site better at Search than Google? Do sites like del.icio.us , digg, reddit provide better search result?
I have tried some searches on 50 Matches, a search engine that crawls only sites linked on digg, reddit, or del.icio.us. 50 Matches returns only the top 50 results in each search (hence the name). The result is discouraging.
While for some specific technical terms the result from 50 matches are good, searching for general topics is not good at all.
There are probably two problems: query engine and the the specificity of sources. Today the tags information can be useful to tune the actual result from search engines and probably as vertical search in the tag engine community.
But if you don’t expect to have in the first place the official web site for your search term, but you want to know what’s going on for a certain subject, social bookmarking is maybe better.
I suppose it would a good idea to build vertical search collecting data from specific social bookmarking or try to build a “social google”. But how incentivate billions of people to save and tag websites?
socialize your internet 