Recently I found myself using the social bookmarking site del.icio.us more often for searches. I find more quickly what I looked for as others have already filtered it for me. They found it worth bookmarking so I do not have to sift through dozens of pages of Google links. I search del.icio.us in my Firefox toolbar (also Flick tags searches are often more fruitful than Google image searches). You can also try a standalone third party Flickr tag browser. Just download the Firefox extension to add these search engines to your toolbar.

A brand new experimental tool called similicio.us leads you to sites similar to yours. On the backend it uses del.icio.us: "People who bookmarked your site also bookmarked this...." Friends help friends to find content. Well, they are not all friends. But neither are the 30.000 "friends" some have in (Rupert Murdoch's) MySpace really friends (in any European sense of the word anyway). But those of the online multitude help each other to get to relevant content. It is an interesting kind of individualistic collectivism (Spehr).

I don't bookmark sites predominantly for others (to be honest). But del.icio.us is an excellent link archive that helps me with my research and teaching. However, surely others benefit from my bookmarking activity. A similar dynamic is in place with peer2peer file sharing. People don't necessarily take part in Bittorrent, for example, to help the larger good. They are in it for themselves and happen to support an alternative economy: peer production in the unregulated commons.

In the context of search-n-tell I'd also like to point to habit-setting uses of Google Video. The tempting carrot is its speed. It has many entries. It has brand recognition. And and and. This seduction may be important for the future. They give you bandwidth but enforce proprietary formats. For searches of video a similar site called YouTube is more benevolent if slower. In Google Video you can search and buy video. But you cannot get a look at the video with the annoying browser frame (so far without ads). Google does not allow you to view their video in other players. In YouTube you can enlarge the window and only see the video at least.

Overwhelmed with information we are grateful for more efficient ways of visualizing content. A tool in that line of enquiry is also the Visual Thesaurus.

Other useful, experimental ways of looking at content is cluster search engines. Here, Vivissimo is a useful tool. Katoo offers 3D visualizations of the linked surrounding of your site. The Touch Graph Google Browser, and People Finder allow you to create graphs of link networks.