I had never seen a website like Delicious until now and I wish I had sooner. I have found it to be a great tool for exploring things I am completely unfamiliar with. Let me give you an example: I am interested in exotic foods. Now I could easily conduct a search about this through any number of sites, but the results I get are likely to be very different. This is because search engines will use some kind of "relevance algorithm" to determine which sites (that they search) are most pertinent to my search. Delicious, on the other hand, relies on user feedback to display its results.
If someone tags a site with the terms "Japanese" and "food" then it will be displayed on my results page. I can then see how popular the results were by seeing how many users "saved" that page. If a site has thousands of "saves" it may be safe to assume that it is quite relevant to those tags assigned to it.
If an expert in a certain field tags a site it is very much like receiving her advice that the site is relevant and/or useful. We cannot know for sure who did the tagging but it would be very easy for collaborating researchers to tag sites in a recognizable way, allowing them to basically communicate. For example: If two researchers were working on a project they could agree to tag all relevant websites a certain way. Then they could search that tag later and easily retrieve them.
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