
I created a bookmarking service you can love. - StavrosK
http://historio.us/?
======
hooande
This is an idea I have wanted to implement myself for a long time. I was very
sad that Google Bookmarks doesn't provide full page search and still requires
me to think up and maintain my own hierarchy of tags/labels/whatever. Nice
work, I'll definitely support you.

My suggestion is that you start looking into ways to group and organize
people's bookmarks automatically. You could start with some simple things, but
I'm very curious to see how more advanced methods would work out.

My biggest feature request: let me import my google bookmarks quickly and
easily.

~~~
StavrosK
Thank you, we're glad you like our product! We have a few people in our team
(including me) who come from a machine learning background, so we will
definitely experiment with some clustering algorithms to see if we can
organise the bookmarks automatically.

You can import your Google bookmarks easily by uploading your bookmarks.html
from Google directly on our "historify site" page. However, this is currently
disabled for performance reasons, but we will soon (i.e. in the next few days)
re-enable it for the users' convenience. Please follow our Twitter feed to be
informed on the status of this, and thank you again for your preference!

------
dryicerx
This looks like a useful service, but just wanted to point out that having a
JS embedded button might not be the best way of going about it, or at least in
it's current form with the historious_key as the only means of authentication.
If a site is expecting historious users, it can have a simple javascript
polling loop that wait until the historious bookmark is activated to jack the
key.

~~~
StavrosK
Hmm, thank you for pointing that vulnerability out... Do you mind contacting
us at support at historious to discuss?

Also, there is a Chrome extension available and we will be writing more as
time progresses (sadly there are more important issues to address).

Thank you very much!

------
KevinMS
We came out with something just like this a little while ago
<http://wheatt.com/> , but nobody here seemed to care.

Although instead if emphasizing text search, which I didn't find that useful
in the beta testing, we focues on combinations of tags, dates, domains,
including terms like "today" and "month", but there is still full page text
search, which can be used in combination with those other search terms.

Maybe its too complicated for most, but I find it useful and use it many, many
times a day.

<http://wheatt.com/>

~~~
alttab
To say nothing about the implementation or usefulness of either, I'd say the
"historious" branding and landing page makes it much clearer what the
experience would be.

The different in response could easily be the marketing? Cool idea either way
- both of them.

------
erikpukinskis
I signed up, but didn't install the Chrome extension. I think you need to be a
lot clearer about what exactly is going on.

For example, if I install the Chrome extension, and then visit my banking
site, are you indexing my bank statements?

Do you only index pages we click Historify on? The answer to that question
ought to be in the privacy policy. You're asking us to install an extension
and give you access to EVERYTHING we do in the browser, but not explicitly
stating the limits on it.

That said, if you're indexing EVERYTHING I browse to, I think this is actually
a really killer app. An app with some insane privacy challenges, but a killer
one nonetheless. If you're only indexing the stuff I bookmark, that's pretty
cool, and a good step forward, but less exciting to me.

~~~
edanm
I didn't think about the "indexing everything" from what they said. But now
that you mention it, it does sound like a great app.

You could have an extension that indexes everything the user goes to. The
trick would be making it usable; I almost never use the "history" in my
browser, because it tends to never find what I'm looking for. But if you try
and solve it in a centralized way, you could do several interesting things:

* Make searches across all the sites you visited work better, maybe by creating better indexes of the content.

* Make the search work according to sites you visited the most (e.g. I'd prefer the search to find comments on HN before other things, then articles linked to from HN, etc.).

Such a service might be pretty useful: browser history that doesn't suck, and
is persistent and accessible online. Anyone want to build it?

~~~
watmough
"The trick would be making it usable; I almost never use the "history" in my
browser, because it tends to never find what I'm looking for."

FYI: History in Safari rocks. Just open the history view and you have fast
searching (including in page text - just checked) that shows all the resulting
pages in a coverflow view.

~~~
edanm
Thanks for the tip, I'll have to check that out. I use Chrome and Firefox, so
I wouldn't know.

Still, something computer and browser independent might make for an
interesting application.

------
thejash
This looks pretty useful. A few feature requests:

\- Import from delicious, to help get people started.

\- An option to automatically add the tags from delicious as part of the text
that you search, because many websites do not contain sufficient text to be
findable without tags (ex: youtube videos with bad titles, direct links to
images/other non-html content, etc)

~~~
StavrosK
Thank you for your feedback! To address your points:

\- There is currently a feature to import from delicious (go to "historify
site"), but it has been temporarily disabled while we make our crawler
multithreaded, because the unexpected popularity and people trying to import
thousands of links at once made indexing very slow for everyone. It should be
up again in the next few days.

\- That is a very good idea! I'm not sure if the delicious dump file has them,
but it should, I'll add it to our bug tracker, thanks!

------
woodall
Where are my bookmarks? I added them, but I can't find an easy way to see
them- although I can search through them.

The auto tweet option is cool, but what about a "post to FaceBook" option.
Might help you adopt a few more people.

URL shortening service might also be something to look at- historio.us/linkid.
You will have to switch some stuff up, like the key-
historio.us/user/key_value.

Allow me to also change my email, not just password. Might even think about
using OpenID in as well.

Look into a real FireFox addon- Reddit's Socialite would be a good place to
start. You can also make a tiny addon to include search in Firefox[2].

Examples in the api documentation would be nice. I keep getting a "3" response
when I request a key.

Found the answer to most of these in the FAQ, but I would still like to do it
all with the UI[1]- who reads FAQs?

I'm free this summer if you need some help. All I ask for is a recommendation
when all is said and done, or not if you are not pleased.

[1] <http://historio.us/help/faq/>

[2]
[https://developer.mozilla.org/en/creating_opensearch_plugins...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en/creating_opensearch_plugins_for_firefox)

~~~
StavrosK
Thank you for your feedback, let me address the points one by one:

1) You can't see your bookmark, that's the point. You don't _have_ to see them
unless you're looking for them! However, we realise people might need to see
the entire list, so you can search for * or "http" to get a list of your
bookmarks. The * search is a bit broken right now, but we are working to fix
it.

2) Facebook posting is also planned!

3) Thanks for that idea, I will add it to our tracker!

4) That is also a good idea, we will have to resend you a validation email but
that's fine. OpenID would also be great, we want to support it very very much
and will do after the high-priority items are sorted.

5) A Firefox extension is planned, but is lower priority right now. Any
volunteers who wanted to write an open source extension would be welcome!

6) You are probably getting a 3 because you are forgetting the "agent"
parameter, if everything else is correct. We do need example, though, thanks!

7) Who wants to clutter the UI? :P

We'd love some help, and would be glad to recommend you! Please contact me at
stavros at historious if you'd like. Also, thank you for the Mozilla link, I
wasn't aware of that and it is very useful.

~~~
varaon
>we realise people might need to see the entire list

Please add a 'Browse' button

------
lionhearted
Okay, quick feedback. The first thing I looked for is the answer to "Public or
private?" Privacy policy has this:

> We will also never share the content of your historified pages with anyone,
> although we might use the URLs of pages to compile anonymized lists of
> popular or new links. We will, however, never share any information about
> which pages you, personally, have historified.

I think that might be a mistake. You'll lose the ability to get people in for
social networking/SEO reasons, and nobody trusts a service like this to stay
private any more anyways. At first I thought, "Well, that's more useful
because it's private" - and then I thought, "Who am I kidding? They'll just
make it public anyways if they get big."

You might consider setting the default to public, maybe with an option for
private.

~~~
StavrosK
First of all, thanks very much for your feedback!

To address your points, there are no plans for your bookmarks to be public, or
have an option to show a page with them, either. The nature of the site
doesn't lend itself to public bookmarks at all, as there is no list of
bookmarks to publicise in the first place. To make it public we would have to
add a search box for people to search in your bookmarks, which may or may not
be useful...

I see what you mean about it, and I agree, but many people have said "I will
never use this if I can't have privacy", so we listened to them. It might,
however, be a typical case of the users not knowing what they want, because
nobody seems to mind facebook...

~~~
lionhearted
> The nature of the site doesn't lend itself to public bookmarks at all, as
> there is no list of bookmarks to publicise in the first place.

Question: Are you building a fun tool for the good of humanity, or do you plan
to make money at some point? From everything that I've seen, making a way to
publicise a list of bookmarks could help you if you're going the latter route.

> It might, however, be a typical case of the users not knowing what they
> want, because nobody seems to mind facebook...

Yes, my first thought was, "I'd only use this if it's private" - my second
thought was, "Wait, actually, I'd use it either way, pretty similarly, and
there'd be additional value if it's public." I might see what people choose
instead of what people say. People talk a lot and then do different things.
Just something to think about, and congrats on launching a pretty cool
service.

~~~
StavrosK
Your points are very valid. It is also my personal opinion that people say one
thing and do another, as far as privacy is concerned. I will put the policy
change on the table and we will think about ways to make the service amenable
to shared bookmarks, as it would indeed be a good feature.

Currently, a way of sharing that I, personally, have found works pretty well
is to enable AutoTweet, which tweets your historified links with a tag. Then
you can search for #historified and you see links people all over the world
have historified. That is just an aside, however, and we will absolutely look
into link sharing.

We don't want to use your links for nefarious purposes or to divulge anything
embarrassing, but having a more lax policy that enables sharing is something
we do want.

Thank you again for your feedback, it is sincerely appreciated.

------
waxpancake
Pinboard's a pretty amazing Delicious alternative. One-time signup fee of $6,
but very much worth it. <http://pinboard.in/>

~~~
StavrosK
historious is an optional $5, so we have that beat!

~~~
pvg
Well, our del.icio.us importer (among others) actually works so we've got
that. Either way, welcome to the fray!

~~~
StavrosK
Haha, now we will work double-time to get that working! Thanks, good luck to
you too!

------
tomazmuraus
Diigo (<http://www.diigo.com>), among other things supports saving page
snaphosts and annotations.

I've been using Diigo for 8 months now and it's just great (I have used some
other services like delicious previously, but they really can't compare to
Diigo which just offers a lot more functionality).

------
crux
Since this is being positioned as a bookmark search engine rather than
repository, I think it would be awful useful to provide a couple-line excerpt
under each search result, just like in a standard search engine. As it is, one
needs to guess a little bit why any given result is given for a search.

~~~
StavrosK
Hmm, this is actually a good idea and I'm not sure why we don't do it right
now. I will add it to the tracker and we will try to implement it soon!

------
nicpottier
1) it doesn't seem to be working, or at least your 'indexer' is so far behind
that I can't tell if its working. At least change it so that when I search for
' _' I see the things that I added and are queued to be indexed.

2) That whole search for '_' thing is pretty lame.. put a link to see 'all'

3) Good on you to make a chrome plugin, but I find it unintuitive. Clicking on
it to bookmark, great, but how do I get to your domain which I always mistype?
I think I'd rather have a very simple menu pop up (big icons?) when I click
the plugin, one with '+' one with a magnifying glass for search. Something
like that. The two most common things I'm going to use this for is adding and
searching, you only make one of those easy with the extension.

Hope you can figure out the scaling issues, bummer to have it melt when you
get press.

~~~
StavrosK
Hello and thanks for your feedback. Let me reply:

1) Yes, the indexer has been lagging a bit behing :/ The search engine is just
so slow, we'll replace it right away.

2) I guess a simple link wouldn't hurt, we'll look into placing it on the
page.

3) That is true, we can have the extension automatically add historious as a
search provider when you install it, which would solve both problems.

Thanks again!

------
pclark
it isn't clear what it is. i click a bookmarklet and you save it and i can
search from there? i can do that with my history, though?

i don't bookmark sites because i don't realize i'll find them valuable till
after i've left.

I really dislike the top image you have ("in three easy steps") because i sat
looking at it wondering if it were an image or a video or a heading, can you
make it more obvious it's a slideshow?

after signing up: ew email confirmation. also seems like i accidentally signed
up twice.

i installed your extension, but have no idea what it does :) also, what does
"historify site" mean?

if i could summize my feedback in a line it'd be: looks neat, but tell me (the
user) what the bet is i'm taking in using your service. clearly.

~~~
StavrosK
Thank you for your feedback, it is very valuable to us as we're always looking
for ways to explain what we do better. The beauty of historious is that you
actually find yourself using it a lot, because bookmarking with it is very
cheap, just one click with no lists to clean up.

The image we do need to change, as it blends in too much. The email
confirmation is just for resetting your password, we don't use it for much
else right now... The extension just bookmarks sites when you click it.

Thanks, we will change the front page to reflect all this!

~~~
pclark
Why not store everything?

~~~
StavrosK
Many reasons, it's too slow especially if you have limited bandwidth, data
becomes much more sensitive (e.g. password, banking details, etc etc), but
most importantly, it increases the noise so much you can't find anything at
all in the end...

------
tzury
i'll give it a try, though let me give you an advice which reflect my problem
with delicious.

I've used delicious, ever since it was a perl script running on a single
server by Joshua. Days went by, delicious went through it revolution/evolution
cycles and stationed where it is right now. However, as a facebook and twitter
user, I want to have all my links and re-tweets save automatically in my
bookmark service. That is, If I tweet about a fascinating page, I'd like to
able to easily retrieve it 6 months later.

that is to say, auto-tweet is nice feature but I am looking for the vice versa
(twitter, facebook, buzz, wherever I go and save/mark links).

Wish you good luck with your new service.

~~~
tzury
tried it out - strange results.

I "historified" this site - HN. Then searched for it in terms of "Hacker News"
and got

    
    
       No documents matched your search. 
       To add more documents to your history, just install the historio.us bookmarklet!
    
       http://historio.us/search/?q=hacker+news&search=Search

~~~
StavrosK
Hello, we're sorry about that issue; we're working to fix it ASAP. For more
details, please see this blog post:

[http://blog.historio.us/performance-problems-and-lessons-
in-...](http://blog.historio.us/performance-problems-and-lessons-in-optimisat)

------
d0m
I like the idea and I was searching as simple as that since a long time. Here
are some suggestions to improve it:

First, it didn't work for me.. I bookmark hacker news with the chrome
extension and I still see the wheel turning.. and even if I search for all
site I bookmarked, I don't see hacker news.

Second, is it really necessary to create an account and check with email, etc.
maybe histio.us/d0m could create automatically an account where I can search
and put a password if I want it secure.

Third, it could be useful if we can search with the chrome extension, instead
of only being able to add bookmark.

Fourth, pretty cool and keep it up :)

Did you thought of a way to make money with that?

~~~
StavrosK
Thanks for your feedback!

The Chrome extension has some problems, sadly, but we can't reproduce the
issue and they are not consistent at all (e.g. some users found that
reinstalling the extension makes them go away). We have no idea why it's
behaving that way, sadly :(

Email confirmation not really that necessary, and I agree that it's an
unnecessary burden. We will look into removing the email verification (but an
account is necessary as you need to be assigned an API key)...

We're adding historious as a search provider in the extension now!

We believe that we should make a fun product first and monetize it later (it's
the wrong way around, I know, but we like it)!

------
SnowLprd
As others have mentioned, Delicious import would be handy. Even better,
however, would be to take it a step further and automatically import on an on-
going basis. This would achieve the following workflow:

1\. In my Historious settings, add my Delicious feed URL

2\. Find a cool link and add it via the Delicious bookmarklet

3\. Historious polls the feed, picks up the new link, and grabs the page

Now I have the best of both worlds:

1\. If I want to see a list of my URLs, I can browse them via Delicious.

2\. If I want to search the saved page data, I can do so via Historious.

~~~
StavrosK
As I mentioned below, there is a delicious importing feature but it has been
disabled while we test the new, faster backend. The workflow you propose would
be very handy, but it would have to support more sites... Luckily, we have an
API anyone can use to write their own tools to add sites to historious!

------
hariis
Certainly a useful service. I know this because the way I used to accomplish
this earlier was, create a Google customized search and manually enter the
sites that I bookmarked with delicious and search from there.

So you got that covered, and I will use it.

However, I just signed up and imported all my delicious bookmarks and did a
search for a tag and the results were not so impressive. Only 5 with
historious and 17 on delicious. Hopefully this will get better.

Looking forward to using your service. Good job!

------
watmough
You seem have a problem in Safari 4. If I select the bookmarklet text, then
drag it to the bookmarks bar, then only the first line was added as a
bookmark.

[NOTE: I just noticed there is an actual bookmark as I suggested below. OK.]

I ended up editing the breaks out of the text to get the bookmark to work.

You should probably bury the bookmarklet text in a link, and have the user
drag that to the bookmarks bar.

Also, you are not sniffing Safari 4 correctly. I get a message that it is an
unrecognized browser!

~~~
woodall
>Also, you are not sniffing Safari 4 correctly. I get a message that it is an
unrecognized browser!

I would be careful about this. Sniffing browsers isn't always a good idea.
Instead, let users drag their own bookmarklet- that correspond with their
browser type- to the toolbar. Or keep sniffing and if you do receive an
"unrecognized browser" response fall back to a page of that type.

~~~
StavrosK
The bookmarklet is the same, the sniffing is for the instructions. The problem
is that we want the code below to be the same as the one in the bookmarklet,
so we use the same file for both, but for some reason newlines are not
removed. I will change that now to make it work with Safari...

------
zizee
This sounds really cool, I have just signed up. That said, my NoScript firefox
plugin gets in the way of the bookmarklet complaining about cross site
scripting. I had a quick go at putting in a exception regex, but no dice.
Anyway, I thought you might like to know that noscript could trip your users
up.

I don't have time right to work out why it's not working, so hopefully I'll
get to try out your service a bit later.

Good luck!

~~~
StavrosK
Thanks for that report, I'll see what we can do!

------
10ren

       You found a great article yesterday - now you can't find it!
    

I think the above style of copy works far better for connecting with readers
and calling out the problem you solve. It's shorter (always good) and assumes
the reader agrees with you (the ones that don't agree aren't your target
anyway - so why equivocate? Plus, in fact everyone has had this problem).

~~~
StavrosK
I agree with that, I will change the copy. We need ideas like these if we want
to increase our conversion rate, and we do!

Thanks again!

------
biafra
It's really nice!

Three suggestions:

1\. Add a snippet with the search terms highlighted

2\. Show the date bookmarked in the result list and (if possible) the date of
the last update.

3\. Document the query language for extended queries

Two questions:

1\. Do you reindex bookmarks after some time?

2\. What indexing engine and platform do you use? (lucene/java?)

One remark:

1\. The Chrome extension is unable to bookmark sometimes. The bookmarklet is
working great.

~~~
StavrosK
Thanks for the suggestions!

1) That is planned and will be added soon, it is a very good idea.

2) I have no idea why we don't do this already, we'll add it straight away!

3) We will, but right now we will be changing backends, so we will document
the new one (probably Sphinx with EXTENDED2).

We don't reindex documents, as they are cached and never change (when you
bookmark something, the bookmarklet sends the source to the server, which is
how we can bypass registrations and paywalls). Plus, you need the document to
be as you remember it.

We currently use Whoosh with Python, but it turns out to be excruciatingly
slow. We will change to either Sphinx or Solr.

We don't know why the extension does that :( We can't reproduce it on any of
our computers, but many users seem to have the problem :/

------
Brainix
I've created a very similar social bookmarking webapp. You just enter a URL,
and my webapp auto-tags it, indexes it for search, and shares it with all of
your followers.

Check it out here: <http://imi-imi.appspot.com/>

------
acangiano
Two suggestions:

* Add a private and public option for bookmarks. Then offer two bookmarklets one for private links, the other for public ones.

* Accept both username and email address when logging in. Otherwise 1Password users will not be able to login automatically.

~~~
StavrosK
Thank you for your feedback, it is much appreciated!

The point of the site is to _not_ have lists of bookmarks, though, so you can
add many many sites and then find them easily. I find that, if I have a list,
I tend to either try and keep it tidy or, if I don't, I just get frustrated
and never look at it. We wanted historious to never show you the extent of
your bookmarks, and to just give you the info you want transparently. That's
why the notion of "public bookmarks" is hard to apply here...

~~~
acangiano
Ok, I like the idea of a private service. It makes sense. However:

* Convince me that this will remain private, forever.

* Assure me that this will remain in business. You can do this in two ways: 1) Charge me $10 a year. 2) Provide an export function from the get go.

~~~
StavrosK
Oh, I bet you'll like <http://historio.us/export/>, but you can still pay us
$10/yr if you want!

~~~
acangiano
Perfect.

------
uuid
I love it when people implement the stuff I haven't had the time to do myself.
Well done.

One suggestion: Your use case is well defined. Don't get thrown off by people
in here suggesting millions of features.

~~~
StavrosK
Thanks, we're trying not to. We're pretty resistant to adding tags,
categories, lists, etc. Even the listing methods implemented now are side-
effects rather than actual functionality.

------
schindyguy
How about an import feature from google web history. Doesn't it also index the
pages you visit for searching? It has a bookmarklet and can crawl all of your
web history if you tell it to

~~~
StavrosK
I think it does, but we're sort of against indexing _everything_ , because
then we'd just turn into Google search... It's much easier to locate something
when you have only three or four documents of that type rather than a
hundred...

------
lazyant
I used <http://www.boomtango.com/> (looks like the same idea) for Firefox but
now I use Chrome unless I need to use yslow or firebug

------
DTrejo
Instapaper is my solution to this problem. When I'm searching for something I
just use ctrl-f.

I save the 1.5mb page to my dropbox every once in a while and I'm good to go.

Of course I'm probably not your target audience.

~~~
StavrosK
Hmm, that only searches in the title, though, doesn't it?

------
atomical
Fast site. What environment are you using? Also, on the page with the
instructions I think the instructions should be at the top. People are less
concerned with the other stuff.

~~~
StavrosK
You mean the screen you see the first time you log in? That's just a short
preamble to tell you how to use historious (many people aren't very
technically minded and don't immediately see how to use the service).
Hopefully it's not too much to read quickly, though!

Thanks for your feedback!

EDIT: Sorry, I didn't answer your first question: We use a Linode in Georgia,
so if you're near there it should be pretty fast (their servers are quite fast
too).

------
j_baker
One thing that would be awesome is if historify would spider someone's blog.
That way, for instance, I could point it towards paulgraham.com and have all
of his essays saved.

------
Entlin
Great idea. I assume you currently aren't saving embedded resources like audio
files or flash movies? It would be even more valuable to a lot of people if
you did.

~~~
StavrosK
Nope, we don't... Those aren't very searchable, though, or we would. PDFs are
a bigger priority, but they we still need to have a way to extract text from
them...

------
yosho
can you add a tiny search bar on the browser? or at least have it be an
option? I don't like visiting the site every time i want to search my
bookmarks, also, it would also be nice having a way to remove the bookmarks
once i've added it. Especially for articles I've read and don't care to read
again.

~~~
StavrosK
You can right-click in the search bar and create a browser search for it, and
then you can use your browser search as normal. To remove the bookmarks, just
click the "remove" link next to them.

------
dabeeeenster
Is there a way of viewing a list of urls that you have historified? Maybe
ordered reverse chronologically?

~~~
StavrosK
Yes, you can search for * and that will give you all the links. There's a
small problem with that, currently, so you can search for http instead to
achieve the same result.

~~~
dabeeeenster
Ah ok. It might be more useful to have a direct link for this on the search
page?

Is there a search help page showing advanced search criteria?

~~~
StavrosK
The hints have various useful tips, and the FAQ page too. There is no page
with the syntax, because we didn't think that users will need anything
special, but we will add one!

------
lastkarrde
How does this differ to services like <http://pinboard.in>?

------
jcapote
This is incredible, I see myself using this a lot as Evernote sucks at this
particular use case. Thanks!

------
jshen
wow, I was planning on making the exact same thing. I think this will be
amazingly useful. Good luck!

~~~
StavrosK
Thank you, we hope so too!

------
raju
Nice work. Signed up. I agree with @thejash - Any chance we can import
bookmarks from Delicious etc?

~~~
StavrosK
Importing from delicious exists (click "historify site" on the top right) and
will be re-enabled as soon as we finish testing the new, faster backend.
Please stay tuned (and follow us at @historrific), we're sciencing as fast as
we can!

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chanux
This exactly what I wanted. Thank you very much for actually implementing it.

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StavrosK
Thank you for your kind words, I am glad you like it!

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lionhearted
I read this at first as "I created a bookkeeping service you can love" which
had me really excited. I'd like a bookkeeping service I can love.

Edit: This does look cool, though.

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StavrosK
I'd like one like that too :(

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Apreche
How is this not redundant with delicious?

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biafra
You cannot search in the content of bookmarked pages with delicious. For
delicious to be useful you need to add tags to the bookmarks.

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zyfo
Simple and potentially very useful. Will give this a try for a while
(previously using pinboard.in).

Suggestions: 1) Chrome extension: keybinding to add current page. 2) Search
results: time options. \- filtering, eg last 24h/last month \- sorting,
results with time headlines and good spacing for quicker overview (looking for
some news article read last week)

