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Mitch Kapor’s (inventor of Lotus 1-2-3, co-founder of the EFF) bookmark-synchronizing utility for Firefox-based browsers, foxmarks, is about to enter the market of human-powered search engines - a space currently heating up - not only since the recent launch of Mahalo. the search engine will utilize user-generated metadata on URLs to deliver - according to TechCrunch - superior search-results compared to Google - especially for popular search-terms, which naturally suffer the most under SEO-efforts. thinking about foxmarks, three questions arise:

• there are obviously privacy issues when using user-submitted data for a public search-offering (update: the foxmarks-Blog promises to give users the ability to opt-out before they’re going to launch a public service)
• when is Yahoo! going to leverage del.icio.us in a similar way? given that del.icio.us has far more users than foxmarks (I’m guessing) this seems to be a no-brainer…
• how is foxmarks going to protect their service, which might work very well while it has not appeared on SEO’s radars, from spammers?

update: after reading that Yahoo! just integrated Flickr’s image search-results (which is superior to the image search at Google or Ask, at least according to Zooomr CEO Thomas Hawk) tightly into their main Yahoo! Image Search product, a possible adaption of del.icio.us-metadata to the Yahoo!-searchengine does sound even more interesting…doesn’t it?

Niall Kennedy writes about a new del.icio.us API allowing to query the top tags & number of bookmarks of any given URL. while the API hasn’t been released officially yet, Yahoo! developer network already features a screencast introducing some of its capabilities. currently, the API seems to consist of a single URL which returns data in JSON-format when queried with the md5′ed hash of the requested URL. f.e., a check for del.icio.us metadata of play.fm returns the following result-set:

[{
"hash":"f636b74442302d5a3e1c7d646f530df0",
"top_tags":
{"mp3":6,
"house":6,
"techno":14,
"archive":4,
"stream":9,
"radio":36,
"streaming":6,
"audio":13,
"music":45,
"electronic":12,
"webradio":13},
"url":"http://www.play.fm/",
"total_posts":71
}]

go to JoostdeValk.nl for some simple php wrapper-code, or subscribe to the official del.icio.us-blog to stay updated on the matter.

update: del.icio.us now also offers a widget exposing the same data for easy integration.