Your favorite social bookmarking tool, Historious, gets some major improvements.

You might remember when @Zee wrote about Historious back in the middle of July. At the time, he called it the bookmarking tool that he had been waiting for. Since then, many more have found out how awesome Historious is to use and have adopted it heavily.

I caught an announcement by one of the developers, last night, about some updates to the tool and thought I’d share them with you.

Improved Performance

At launch, Historious could only handle a few requests per minute. With new improvements to the hardware behind it, there has been a pretty vast improvement to the capacity of the service, and newly-bookmarked sites should be ready to index almost immediately.

OpenSearch Integration

You can now search your Historious bookmarks right from your browser’s search bar. It’s a pretty welcome addition, for those of us who rely on Historious heavily.

Public Bookmarks and Sharing

One of the most requested features was to be able to push your bookmarks out into the public. Now you’ll be able to publish on any site and your bookmarks will appear in your public Historious page. The page can be broken down into keywords, which is invaluable for those who have literally thousands of bookmarks shared. If you’ve chosen to share your finds, people browsing your page can use the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button to be taken to a random bookmark in the public cloud.

Subscription Plans

Of course, all of this function doesn’t come easy. For power users of Historious, there is now a subscription program that will open up some added features. While bookmarking of up to 1,000 sites is free (and should cover the vast majority of users), you can go up to 15,000 unlimited sites with a $3/month subscription.

The other features? Tagging, no ads and the ability to text search within PDF files. All of these are awesome, but the PDF text search is sure to set a bar.

Overall, these are some great and welcome features to an already-wonderful service. If you’ve not given Historious a try, it’s high time that you do.