It appears Yahoo is finally ready to step a bit outside traditional search and finally use one of its biggest assets to its advantage. According to Mike Arrington of TechCrunch, Yahoo is testing out integrating Del.icio.us into its search results.

As shown in the sample page, this would place a Del.icio.us icon below each result in a given search. Next to that icon would be the number of people who have shared that particular link on Del.icio.us and up to the three top keywords that it was tagged with. Both the share number and tags would be hyperlinks that lead back to the Del.icio.us page corresponding with the result.

I like this move – a lot. I think it’s well past the time for Yahoo to realize they are not going to catch Google in search save for some epic failure on Google’s part. Aside from a prettied-up search experience with their ‘Search Assist’ capabilities, Yahoo has thus far given me no real reason to use their search over Google – but this Del.icio.us is an interesting idea.

Basically this is a small step in the direction of crowd-sourced search results. The results aren’t ranked based on the number of people who shared a link on Del.icio.us, but perhaps that should be an option to further differentiate results from Google Search. The search results pages also aren’t overwhelmed by this inclusion of the Del.icio.us data, so users who have no use or understand as to what this is, can keep about their regular searches relatively undistracted (and I have to think this feature would be able to be turned off if a user desired).

Just imagine if Google had something like this but replaced Del.icio.us results with the number of people who ’shared’ or ’starred’ a link in Google Reader. When that comes, I will be a very happy man.

Does this mean Yahoo is finally ready to step up and really use some of its assets to its advantage? Sure it’s important to keep the original user experience intact, but if you’re struggling in your field at some point you have to take advantage of what you have at your disposal. Ideas like this one definitely seem like a step in the right direction.

More thoughts:

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