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Social search has a brand new contender - Diigo Currently social search appears to be the hottest topic on the internet. The theory is that more useful and meaningful search results can be gathered regarding the true value of sites by getting users to recommend websites rather than utilising a series of computer generated algorithms.Traditional search engine results, such as those supplied by Google and Yahoo!, are primarily based on objective criteria such as counts of the backlinks from other sites. These links are seen as votes on the importance of that page for a given set of criteria. Social search allows users to assign their own votes regarding which sites are worthwhile, by sharing bookmarks of favourite sites, adding their own subject tagging, or making annotations to listings. This creates a more subjective set of results, which some feel can more accurately reflect which sites are most meaningful for particular search terms. The concept of social search has been continually evolving since social bookmark sites like Del.icio.us and Shadows first appeared through to more involved services such the social networking sites MySpace and MyWeb, or the social news source Digg.Now a new player has appeared on the scene. Diigo (Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff) which was launched on Monday aims to combine a number of features such as shared bookmarking, blogging and web page tagging into a single service along with a powerful toolbar search tool.Diigo promotes itself as an online social research and "social annotation" tool, allowing users to:"Collect, share and interact on online information from anywhere”. By letting users quickly create their own comment on sites as well as highlight, clip or make sticky-notes for webpages, and providing access to organic search or their own social search results, which can be adjusted to suite the users preferences, Diigo has created a service with several interesting resource sharing and community promotion features. By taking onboard search features normally associated with search toolbar extension filters such as the ability to restrict keyword searches to the site you're currently viewing, the usability of the search functions have been increased to make this a useful service regardless of whether the user is looking to fully immerse themselves in the online social environment.While there is currently no direct official link between social search results and organic results obtained on the traditional search engines, many users have recently started to find information from the likes of MySpace creeping in. With Google and Yahoo! both having their own networks it looks likely that more of the features and results will either be merged together or be offered alongside each other so that you can get different sets of results depending on your preferred search method.Whether Diigo is here to stay or is set to quickly disappear like many other social search sites, remains to be seen, however the simple customisable interface and powerful set of useful tools make this one of the best offerings for some time.

diigoToolbar-IE (9) A powerful Web annotation tool - the first of its kind. With the Diigo toolbar and the associated Web site, in addition to tagging Web pages as Delicious does, you get the following powerful features: add sticky notes and highlights to any specific texts of a Web page (unique to ...

Here is what the folks at Diggo have to say about the extension. Several powerful features are combined in the Diigo toolbar to make this a real “power extension” and must-have for anyone who browse a lot of stuffs online. An All-in-One Bookmarking Tool: bookmark to Diigo, delicious, Simpy, furl, spurl and make them permanently cached and full-text searchable. A Powerful Blogging Platform : Annotate webpages and quickly turn them into blogs with a built-in blog editor or enhanced linkrolls. A Great Collaborative Tool: share and interact on online findings, complete with highlights and sticky notes. The Most Customizable Search Tool: like Google’s toolbar, but fully customizable, so you can add any other specialty searches - dictionaries, music, movies, references, and maps. Here is a comment I found via the Mozilla Add-ons Web site that I think fits Diggo perfectly. Diigo is the best bookmarking tool that I’ve tried. And this extension is a must! You can bookmark a page right from your context menu, which includes highlighting parts of the page when you bookmark, and you can also forward a bookmark to someone. I don’t even keep my bookmarks in my browser anymore - I got tired of looking at 100+ jumbled bookmarks in my browser, so now I use the Diigo extension to retrieve them. I like being able to bring them up as-needed, but the rest of the time they’re stored at my Diigo homepage.

Diigo: sharing and publishing bookmarks with tags and little comments attached to them is nice, but providing detailed annotations directly onto Web pages is even nicer, and Diigo is definitely leading the pack there. Annotations used to require the use of a dedicated plugin with initial releases of the application, but the company listened to persistent requests from users (including myself), and developed a plugin-free version as well. Definitely worth checking if you consider your bookmarking tool as a real productivity application.

8. Ramon deSilva  |  January 16th, 2007 at 3:20 pm Ismael, That was an interesting writeup. You covered a number of sites, and offered useful capsule summaries. I’ve looked over many of the sites you mention, and used del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, and Diigo. They are all good sites for bookmarking. But I think you overlooked a few points about Diigo that make it different from, and far superior to, any of the other sites. 1. As well as the ability to highlight and add sticky notes to web pages, you can collect the annotations from any set of pages (say, those tagged web-2.0-services) into a single source, with original URLs noted, to simplify your research. 2: The Diigo toolbar allows you to place all the search tools you might want, grouped by purpose, in a single button, so you can easily use multiple search tools for extensive research. The integration of this with bookmarking and annotation capabilities makes Diigo the most full-featured, capable research tool available. Diigo has other abilities; too many to list here. Overall, Diigo will save anyone who spends much time doing research on the Internet time and effort. True, you need to spend a bit of time learning all the features so you can incorporate them into your work habits, but the effort will pay off many times over. Overall, Diigo is the one service I find I cannot live without. There are other tools out there that do a nice job of this or that, and I use some of them. But Diigo is the only one I depend on throughout the day and could not live without.

How many users would like a del.icio.us++ where they can not only bookmark the URL, but also highlight specific parts of the page? Personally, I can’t live without highlighting: it helps me re-read the page, or realize that I’ve seen it before. -Laurent

Besides simply tagging and storing bookmarks online, Diigo seems to offer a couple of unique features focused on the idea of annotation and collaboration. Diigo's power comes from the Diigo toolbar. With the toolbar, a user can quickly access stored bookmarks tagged as "Links" (or other tags by simply changing the filter) via a traditional folder. From this toolbar, searches can be executed across all bookmarks, blog search engines, or any incredible number of sources of interests such as Movie/TV or Shopping. There is also a one-click access to your "Inbox" on the toolbar - essentially allowing real-time access to tags you are trying to track.