Search Engine Journal

Yahoo is launching the new version of Delicious.com (del.icio.us) today and with or without the dots, the company seems to be moving on with its social bookmarking platform, even without Joshua Schachter (the original founder of del.icio.us who left Yahoo in the Spring) behind the wheel.

Delicious was supposed to rebrand about a year ago, but they have finally “dropped the dots” and are now rebranded as Delicious.com instead of del.icio.us.

Under Yahoo’s wing, Delicious has grown from having 300,000 registered users 2 years ago to 5 million users today, a significant increase.

The new Delicious hopes to appease this nation of active social bookmarkers with a new enhanced platform with faster performance, flexible search and search within the Delicious social graph.

Delicious has made these changes (from the Delicious Blog) :

Speed: We’ve moved to a new infrastructure that makes every page faster. This new platform will enable us to keep up with traffic growth while ensuring Delicious is responsive and reliable. You may not have noticed, but the old backend was getting creaky under the load of five million users.

Search: We’ve completely overhauled our search engine to make it faster and more powerful. Searches used to take ages to return results; now they’re very quick. The new search engine is also smarter, and more social: you can search within one of your tags, another public user’s bookmarks, or your social network. Now it’s easier to take advantage of the expertise and interests of your friends, not to mention the Delicious community at large.

Design: Finally, we’ve updated the user interface to improve usability and add a few often-requested features (such as selectable detail levels and alphabetical sorting of bookmarks). Our goal has been to keep the new design similar in spirit to the old one, so all of you veterans should be able to jump in without any confusion. At the same time, we’re hoping that newcomers to Delicious will find it easier to learn.