Delicious Move Into Real Time Search? Yum.

Delicious, one of the more widely used social bookmarking services, is undergoing a few changes. And it’s about time. New enhancements to search, tweet, and discover bookmarks have been added to the site, making it even more social and readily able to recommend content to users.

The new search tools include an advanced time line along with tag filtering controls, so you can determine a date range among other filter options for the content you’re seeking. Other updates to the search results page include inline playback for YouTube videos, Flickr images, and Yelp local data.

On the one hand, it’s useful to provide such search enhancements. Things like inline video playback and images are becoming standard for nearly all instances where a video or image would be included in search results, especially within social bookmarking websites. It’s something that Yahoo’s new search partner, Microsoft, did from the beginning of its Bing launch. Now both Bing and Delicious have a more media-rich and interactive set of results. Given that Flickr is another of Yahoo’s properties, it’s overdue that Delicious include images in its search results.

With the date-specific time lines and added filter options, Delicious is also able to possibly respond to the real time search results trend, which looks to blogs, microblogs and other forms of web content to provide a glimpse of what’s going on right now. A date range filter could help users hone in on a glimpse of content for any given time, thanks to the archives of social media bookmarking. Perhaps this could lead to a step in another direction for the evolution of real time search results.

Another feature update that speaks to this is the Fresh Bookmarks option Delicious. With this you can see the latest sites that people are bookmarking and discussing, which helps you track the buzz on both Delicious and Twitter. I think that combined with the other recommendation and search updates on Delicious, we’re seeing the social bookmarking site move in a very interesting direction.

Lastly, there are now options to email and tweet bookmarks you come across on Delicious. This of course makes it infinitely easier to share content across the social web, furthering the recommendation capabilities of Delicious from an interactive standpoint. From the looks of it, these added sharing options are designed more specifically for friends that aren’t on Delicious. Such an outward sharing mechanism will help curb spam issues that Digg had to manage with its internal email notification system.