A simple but useful application for Google Co-op On-the-fly Custom Search

My del.icio.us linkstream is a bit like a window into my stream of consciousness.

I've always wanted to be able to 'search outward' from just my delicious links ... a recent post from Alf about Google Co-op 'on-the-fly' search engines just triggered a simple but really useful idea; make a Google Co-op search of my delicious linkstream ... this way I can search just within pages I've deemed worthy of bookmarking.

After a bit of wrangling with the various ways of getting data out of delicious (see my own comments to this post), I found this script for generating an html page of links from delicious. This page contains all my delicious links, not just the most recent ones (it seems you can only get a subset of the most recent links without authenticating with delicious, hence the PHP script using the delicious API).

So, after hosting the PHP script revealing all my links, I can point the Google Co-op Custom Search Engine to that page, and search away ! It's a nice way of using search to 'retrace' my steps, since it should generally restrict results to the parts of the web I've already seen and rated as worthy of re-examination.