Making del.icio.us work for me

I’ve been posting links to del.icio.us for sometime now. Mainly things I can’t get to right now or don’t access frequently enough to warrant cluttering up my bookmarks with but don’t want to loose track of. When I first started, I would tag things with whatever keywords I could think of. After a while of doing this, I ended up with a huge number of tags but still couldn’t find anything. There was just too much random stuff to filter on.

Attempt #2: I decided to whittle my tags down to the smallest set possible. This was better however every time I went to tag something I found needed to sift through the existing tags and decide which one(s) suited, remember if I had used the plural or singular form, etc. and even then, there was just too much stuff to sift through because now all my links were concentrated in only a few tags.

Attempt #3: My most recent attempt, and the one that has been working brilliantly for me now, is to not worry too much about what exact tags I’m using but, rather than tag it with everything I can think of, I instead use exactly the same keywords I would use were I to search for the link on Google. This sometimes means I have tags that wouldn’t seem to make sense as categories on their own.

Now when I want to find something I’ve bookmarked, I go to my del.icio.us page and search through “your bookmarks” – shouldn’t that be “my bookmarks”? – as if I were doing a search on Google. I reckon I have a close to 100% hit rate and at most 2 or 3 results for any given search. I’ve finally managed to make del.icio.us useful!

Even better, I have set up a custom search in LaunchBar: http://del.icio.us/search/?type=user&p=*