Search has been fairly static for a few years now with no major alterations in how search engines rank their results. Google, Yahoo and MSN all use links and on page factors as the main indicators of relevance and Google especially does an excellent job at providing results.
To improve on the results the search engines need to figure out a way of including bookmark data in the results. Google already has a patent for re-ranking results based on bookmarks either on the users machine or using an online service and Yahoo could easily integrate del.icio.us data if they had more resources.
Firefox 3 comes with better bookmarking and no doubt some Firefox users would be happy to share their bookmark data with Google to get more personalized search results.
The big question is which company will do it first?
I think that this would be a great idea for Yahoo or MSN to consider, as realistically they cannot compete with Google. They should try & make their search ‘more unique’ in comparison to Google.
msn or yahoo definitely could benefit from this