I don't spend much time at Yahoo, but noticed that Del.icio.us stats are now appearing under listings that have been bookmarked. Does anyone know when this started? Are search engines moving more towards ranking sites based on the number of bookmarks? BTW, I searched for "siteexplorer" without quotes and saw the bookmark tags.
I don't think so... where do you see it, can you give a specific example or steps to reproduce it? e.g. go to http://search.yahoo.com, search for "linkbliss" I don't see anything. Could it be you have some del.icio.us toolbar installed or some such? I have seen Google result appear differently when you have the StumbleUpon toolbar installed for instance. Eric
I rechecked and it was not there. I should have taken a screenshot. Besides the Google toolbar, I only have the stumbleupon toolbar installed. And the SU toolbar is deactivated. If I see it again I will post a pic.
I was also seeing del.icio.us stats during Yahoo searchs until about 7 days ago. I do not have the Yahoo toolbar installed or del.icio.us buttons - I do have a del.icio.us account.
can be viewed here: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/19/delicious-integrated-into-yahoo-search-results/ Sorry, I should have added to my previous post.
Your original question still intrigues me. I also am interested in the impact on social bookmarking on organic postition. I have to believe that this information may add another arrow to our SEO quiver.
Sooner or later I believe there will be some integration of social bookmarking and search result rankings. The goal of a search engine is to produce highly relevant results, and votes for such pages could be taken into account with their algorithms. This would allow the search engines to not only list relevant information but information deemed popular by vote. Such a system would be prone to abuse, but voting patterns could be easily mapped over time. Those that vote in groups would be identified and therefore penalized. But this system would allow voters to almost eliminate spam from appearing anywhere near the top search results. What a powerful system it would be.