Artem Russakovskii's programming and technology blog

Updated: January 16th, 2010

Introduction

I love Delicious. It allows me to store my bookmarks, tag and search them, and, best of all, have access to them from anywhere on the web.

Searching bookmarks by keyword is easy – just enter a bunch of keywords into the search page and off you go but what if you want to confine your results to a certain domain? The main reason I wanted to do it personally is so that I could see all pages of my site bookmarked by Delicious users and the corresponding number of bookmarks. However, the only url based search Delicious offered was a full url lookup:

This search is very limited – it accepts only a full url to the page in question.

Such limitations were unacceptable and prompted me to file a suggestion/idea on the Delicious forum earlier this year to allow searching for *all* bookmarks in a given domain. To my pleasant surprise, Delicious rolled out these new search features within the last month (very quietly for some reason, are they in alpha?). There was no mention of them on their blog or anywhere else on the web really.

So how does the new search/filter work?

Check it out:

site:yoursite.com allows searching by domain

For example, site:beerpla.net currently returns 104 results and I can see all of my sites' pages and their bookmark numbers on a single page:

Moreover, you can combine the site: query with tags

Like so: site:beerpla.net hidden php to filter the results further.

You can also search part of a url using the url: construct

For example, url:beerpla.net/2009/ finds bookmarked blog posts from 2009 only:

I'm not really sure why one would use site: if they could just use url: – it seems like the latter can do everything the former can do and more. Perhaps Delicious can clarify that.

Also, doing something like url:hidden-features-of doesn't bring back any results, even though I thought url: is supposed to search parts of the url. A bug or a feature?

Conclusion

Thanks to Delicious for following through with the search improvements and listening to your users. Special thanks to Delicious's own britta for being on top of things and responding to an 8 month old forum post.

Now perhaps someone will write a plugin to figure out the TOTAL number of bookmarks for a specific domain or modify an existing one (*cough*, ImprovingTheWeb, *cough*)?