I don’t think this is being done intentionally, but more and more I’m coming across tools — mashups, tag sites, or uses of Wikipedia data — that are increasingly making searchable subject indexes irrelevant. Makes you wonder what’s going to happen to Yahoo’s Directory, the Open Directory Project, etc etc. The latest example of this kind of site is Delexa, a site that mixes del.icio.us tags with Alexa data to provide information on the top 50,000 US Web sites (as ranked by Alexa.) Check it out at http://www.delexa.org/ . It’s in beta.

You can search this site by tag (supplied by Del) or search by domain name. The first thing I did was search by tag for Wii. I got a list of search results that showed the Delexa rank (how relevant it is to your search results), the US rank (which I think is set by Alexa) and the tag rank (which I think — there’s not any documentation I can find — counts the number times the resource has been tagged for the keyword for which you’re searching). You can reorder the list by any of these three ranks. At the end of these three ranks is the site URL.

There’s a link to take you directly to the site, but if you click on the URL you’ll get a page of information, including a page snapshot, tag listings, and links to a whole bunch of data, including Alexa and Del pages, a link to pagerank prediction, links to a wiki about domains (About Us), and site age. (That’s the result you get if you choose to do a search by domain instead of a search by tag. Remember this site ranks only the top 50,000 site — you’re not going to find every domain here.)

There are a few problems with the site. It doesn’t seem that you can do multiple word searches, so pick the single search term carefully. There’s no result count that I can see. On the other hand it’s interesting to how high the rankings are for the various words you might choose, it was nice to use Del tags to search a predefined set of sites, and I saw nothing in the line of spam results. Worth a look.

(Do you think they could create another list of tagged customer complaint sites and call it Dislexa?)