After at first appearing to be shutting it down, Yahoo is now apparently selling delicious (or possibly giving it away). Google or Microsoft should be first in line to pick it up, but especially Google. Why? Because delicious would help immensely with battling spam and content farms, something many folks have criticized Google for lately, including Jeff Atwood and Marco Arment. That was of course the original idea behind Yahoo buying delicious – at that time Yahoo was still very much in the search business. Delicious has a lot of signal in it that allows for distinguishing between real accounts and spam accounts (and more could have been added under better stewardship of the service). The real accounts in turn can be used as one input into search results that can help improve the quality of results for everyone. Of course for a delicious user the obvious thing to do would be to include pages remembered on delicious in the results. As an active user of delicious I would be delighted for it to find the home that it always deserved.
