Why Simpy is Better than Del.icio.us August 23, 2005

Most of you probably have known that Simpy is is a social bookmarking service. With Simpy, you can save, tag and search your own bookmarks and notes or browse and search other users’ links and tags. You can be open and share your links with others, or keep them private. Simpy also helps you find like-minded people, discover new and interesting sites, publish your bookmarks, detect and eliminate link-rot, etc. But, why should we use Simpy over Del.icio.us?

The better features of Simpy over Del.icio.us are the ability to actually find something in Simpy once you tag and save it. That is because Simpy provides full-text search, just like Google or Gmail. You can search any of the fields (titles, tags, nicknames, annotations), but also the indexed full-text content of your bookmarks. With Simpy you can use all Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT), +, and – to require and prohibit search terms, you can use phrase and fuzzy queries, etc. When you have a few hundred or few thousand links saved, this is an absolute must if you want to be able to find something you saved month or years ago. Del.icio.us only lets you “search” for tags, and only lets you combine tags (foo+bar), calling it a tag intersection, when in fact it’s just a conjunctive (AND) Boolean query. You cannot exclude tags with del.icio.us, you cannot combine them, you cannot search for phrases, and so on. If my information is out of date, please let me know.

You can read more about the advantages of using Simpy at Why Simpy over del.icio.us