Searching your Delicious bookmarks

On the blog What I learned today, I found out that there is now a search engine for your del.icio.us bookmarks. It is called del.izzy and although still in beta format, looks interesting.  It searches through the titles of your bookmarks as well as through the contents of each bookmarked page or site. This will make it a very powerful tool.

I signed in, identifying my login and password, to begin a search. The site claims not to store your password. The initial sign-up information is to check your credentials and for all your bookmarks to be obtained (not just the public ones). To make using del.izzy faster, the bookmarks are cached and only the new ones needed to be added to new searches. Del.izzy uses Google (as a Google custom search) as its search mechanism and is a powerful search.

I tried a few searches. One search, with the keywords – book review podcast – brought up many hits. I tried - ”book review“ podcast – and found it reduced the hits for the search significantly.  The results screen is fairly clean and streamlined.

I can see uses for this search tool, especially when searching for reasonably specific items.

100 Unbelievably Useful Reference sites

Having a break from the “big” picture questions, I have been searching on the web for various pieces of information and I stumbled across this site. There are so many reference sites, do we need any more? Probably not but I discovered this fascinating site. I found myself scrolling through 100 Unbelievably Useful Reference Sites You’ve Never Heard Of from Teaching tips.com.

This site offers us an eclectic collection of dictionaries, professional teaching and library resources, fun sites, databases, sites about health, “homework help”, search engines, consumer research, etc. So when you are “investigating” some of these sites, and some of those I looked at were quite absorbing, remember you are doing research, not “just playing” or, heaven forbid, having fun!

To quote the authors, “we’ve compiled just 100 of our favorites, for teachers, students, hypochondriacs, procrastinators, bookworms, sports nuts and more.”