Yahoo! continues to assimilate the popular tag powered web tools with its acquisition of del.icio.us. Aside from a Yahoo! copyright notice and perhaps a Yahoo! logo at the footer of the del.icio.us pages, I’m sure they’ll refrain from making del.icio.us look like Yahoo!, just as they have done with Flickr. There will be no ads or promotions displayed in amongst tagged bookmarks, nothing immediately obvious that will be making them money. What Yahoo! will have is a few more talented employees who know how to make tools that change the way people use the web. And of course, these are employees that Google do not have.

Yahoo! own the trademark ‘Dig It. Tag It. Share It™’. It seems they want to be the Search company that is responsible for this alternative and new way of categorising, searching, and displaying information; the tags, the folksonomies, and the social aspect of their creation. I guess it’s a more human approach than Google’s faceless algorithms, and one which may help them restore their position as the leading search company.