Popular social bookmarking service del.icio.us has finally unveiled one of its most  significant and anticipated redesigns since launching in 2003. Ars Technica went  hands on to see what Yahoo has in store for the next generation of social  bookmarking.

As a quick primer for those who haven't hopped on the bandwagon yet: social  bookmarking websites allow you to save URLs in "the cloud" instead of in a  single browser. Bookmarks can be tagged with multiple keywords for easy  categorization and recall, which offers a number of benefits. First, sites like  these are great resources for watching what other human beings (not automated  search engines) are interested in. Second, by harnessing the many integrated tools for  both saving and retrieving bookmarks, you can harness these social filtering  tools as a way to liberate your web browsing habits since your bookmarks are no  longer locked up in a single browser or even computer.

One of the most subtle, yet important, changes in the new Delicious (called  "delicious 2" by everyone but its developers) is the loss of two periods from  its name. The URL used for the service until now has always been a clever play  on domain names: del.icio.us. Now that URL, and all links to bookmarks saved at  it, redirect to the much friendlier delicious.com.

Explained in an announcement blog post,  the new Delicious focuses on three fundamentals: speed, search, and design.  Browsing through the site, that first criteria has clearly been met. Yahoo says  Delicious has over 5 million users now, and as a regular user of the site for  around three years, I've noticed the gradual slowdown that Delicious  acknowledges. That creeping sluggishness is nowhere to be found anymore, though,  and clicking through tags from both my own bookmarks and across the site's  community is really zippy.

Next on Delicious' menu is the all-important search, which again focused on  speed but also utility. I no longer have time to make a pot of coffee while  waiting for results, and Delicious' search is both more accurate and social. A  search can be directed at one's own tags, a single user's public bookmarks, the  bookmarks from one's social network, or of course, the entirety of Delicious.  Either way, searches are lightning quick, though I'm disappointed to see the  default search option point at the entirety of Delicious, instead of my own  bookmarks. Perhaps the Delicious crew has real user statistics to prove that  this is the better choice, but I prefer rooting through my own maze of bookmarks  and tags before embarking out through the rest of Delicious. At the least, I  would like a feature to customize this default setting.

As a brief side note, I'm very glad to see that the Delicious crew maintained  composure when it comes to the social networking aspects of the site. The  ability to add friends and send links to other users is definitely a value of  the service. But in the back of my mind I always worried that this new version  would bring a lot of ridiculous cruft like extensive user profiles or, heck,  even minigames like "Link that beer" or "URL Scrabble." It's refreshing to see  that the site maintained just the bare necessities of a "network" list of  friends, as well as "fans" who are interested in what you're bookmarking.