Delicious has announced some refinements to its recently redesigned homepage that make the bookmarking site an even more useful tool for tracking the real-time web.

Among the new features is the ability to narrow any search down to spans of a mere five minutes. While it’s not for everyone, if you’re trying to find better ways to filter the fire hose of information that is real-time data, Delicious’ new search tool is an easy way to do it.

There’s also a very cool new interactive graph for filtering bookmarks around larger chunks of time. For example, if you wanted to see all your bookmarks added on this day last year, just click the interactive graph, select the start and end points and then click the search button to narrow the results.

While narrowing by time is hardly a new feature, the graphical interface is considerably more intuitive (and cooler) than simply plugging your dates in a text field. If nothing else, it’s a nice example of how much careful attention to interface design can improve a website.

In fact, the new Delicious seems to have something of fetish for charts and graphs. Charts also appear on each link’s “count” page, showing who has bookmarked it. For example, the Webmonkey homepage has been bookmarked over 5500 times, but the new chart (click the chart icon to see it) reveals a huge spike in June 2008 shortly after we relaunched the site.

Delicious’ new charts aren’t limited to the site either. There’s a new “Tagometer” widget that allows you to embed a chart on your own pages showing the number of saves over time and the most frequently-used tags. Right now you’ll need to cut-and-paste some JavaScript into your pages, but it probably won’t be long before someone creates a plug-in for WordPress and other platforms.

The final change Delicious has unveiled is an iPhone-optimized mobile site. The site is geared toward making it easier to bookmark pages on the iPhone, so you can read them later. While we prefer Instapaper for that sort of thing, the Delicious mobile site has other options — like quickly browsing recent bookmarks — which heavy users will appreciate.

See Also:

• Revamped Delicious Turns to Twitter for Real-Time Search
• Send Web Video to Boxee With Delicious Bookmarks
• Delicious Gets New Look, Loses Dots

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