After poking around on the del.icio.us site for a while - I could see how it would be useful to have a tool like this at our disposal as librarians...
Part of the problem with search engines is that they use algorithms for ranking website relevance that may not be a true indication of a site's usefulness to certain audiences, or an accurate analysis of a site's content.
The reason for this is that sites which are very image rich - and may be sparse in meta tags - might still be very worthwhile - and search engines like Google would possibly miss them because they were looking for certain criteria (like target word occurence or other factors) and sites which have a big visual component may suffer in their rankings.
I did appreciate the democratic feel of user reviewed sites and links - and seeing the statistics regarding user bookmarks is definitely helpful in determining which sites are worthwile - because other people have taken the trouble to catalog and document their experiences at the web site or link.
All in all - del.icio.us is most helpful in adding a dimension of depth to a search engine's finding that would otherwise cost me valuable time in research myself :)
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