InSuggest: a no-nonsense approach to site recommendations
Written on 13th June 2008
2 COMMENTS 
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
While we’ve already been waiting nine months for the new Delicious to arrive, the service still seems to be the standard in social bookmarking. I can see why, as Delicious is a robust tool that does the job and thousands of people – maybe millions – have their treasure room of valuable links there. Google Reader and Wordpress integration does the rest. So while Arrington still complains about the silence from Yahoo’s side, web services keep building Delicious mash-ups. One of the latest examples – called inSuggest - seems particularly useful, as it recommends new bookmarks on the bases of your existing ones.
Filtering by tags
After typing in the Delicious username, inSuggest presents five recommendations per page. I was surprised by the good results, inSuggest even knows how to manage my Dutch bookmarks. The interface is dark and shiny, the navigation works smoothly. One of the most useful features is the possibility to filter the recommendations per tags. When I first entered my username, inSuggest came up with a bunch of CSS sites, based on my bookmarks from a year ago – when I was a web designer. My interests lie somewhere else now, so I managed to get some better recommendations by clicking my ‘blogging’ tag.
No-nonsense approach
This Swedish service certainly contributes something to the social bookmarking field, as it offers a refreshing approach. In a time where every service seems to recommend new sites on the bases of linking you to “like-minded” people – often leading to vague results, this no-nonsense approach is a welcome alternative.
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By Arno Manders on Jun 13, 2008
Very nice service they have good suggestions. The only minus point is the way they display the title of the suggested link. On my resolution (1280×1024) a lot of titles are cut of and it is hard to say if they are useful for me.
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By Bob Boynton on Jun 13, 2008
The aesthetics are terrific unless you want to see what you are getting. Burnt orange on black is lovely — just illegible. Getting printing in their boxes requires setting your browser to whatever dimensions they used as that does not seem to work for 1280×1024 nor 1680×1050.
I saw this website reviewed a couple of days ago. I tried it and it could not find my del.icio.us user name. But I tried it today and I am found.
I have a del.icio.us account that is very heavy on web 2.0 software/services. inSuggests suggestions were plausible though the one from South Africa seemed a bit odd.
I also have a del.icio.us account about politics — which is how I make my living — and that seemed beyond their recommendation machine. To try more specific suggestions I clicked on the tag webcampaign2008. The recommendations were: Technorati:Home, MediaPost Publications – Cond??Net Strik, Gmail – Postvak IN, Lifehacker, and Google Reader. OK webcampaign2008 is an abstaction so I tried something concrete: Ron Paul. It had no recommendations for Ron Paul. If you search YouTube for Ron Paul you find 126,000 clips. If you search news blogs Ron Paul is equally ‘present.’
This may be unfair. They are a Swedish website and I was asking about US politics.
On the other hand this suggests that they have not gotten very far in processing the trillions of entries on the web.
This is a very neat idea. But they seem to have a long way to go. Perhaps they and you can tell us when they have made significant progress.
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