

Ask HN: How to make bookmarks useful. - andreim

Here's a concrete example. Particular details are irrelevant and are intentionally absurd:<p>Say I'm debugging my halting_problem_decider.cc when I get some obscure compiler error. Googling it, I somehow stumble on a site that offers all of Britney Spears's music for download--a true diamond in the rough for a true britney fan (assume I know nothing of bittorrent). I'm absolutely ecstatic, but since my boss wants the halting problem solved by lunchtime, I must restrain myself to bookmarking it for future enjoyment and return to work.<p>Years later I'm looking for an mp3 version of "you drive me crazy" (still no bittorrent). By then I've forgotten all about the life-changing site I had discovered in my youth. So instead of going directly to it, I'm ignorantly wading through bait-and-switch-type ad-infested sites purporting to have my song for download. Meanwhile the site I need is uselessly taking up space in my bookmarks, never to be used again.<p>In effect the problem is this: it's not enough to store useful resources if you don't remember to use them. Bookmarks store things, but they don't remind you of the things you've stored (address bar autocomplete is a first-approximation solution to this problem).<p>Possible solution: Since my go-to place for anything is Google, why not bring my bookmarks to it? That way when I google "you drive me crazy mp3", the site I serendipitously found years ago will float at the top of the search results.
One possible implementation of this could use Google custom search to index personal bookmarks. But this would merely create a separate Google for your bookmarks instead of bringing your bookmarks to /The/ Google.
Another, more promising approach would be to use subscribed links (http://www.google.com/coop/docs/subscribedlinks).<p>Before I waste a weekend on this only to reinvent the wheel: Anyone seen anything like this? Any suggestions? (and can you help me debug my halting problem solver?!!)
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DanielRibeiro
These guys agree with you: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1941823>

An by these guys I mean: Pinboard, Diigo, Historious. And there are the less
known: ScrapBook and Greplin. And the traditional, and weakest of all:
Delicious

Problem: bookmarks from 3 years ago are hardly relevant. I have to clean my
delicous from time to time, as these links not only go stale, but even if the
did, they are just so horribly outdated, that the information is just not
relevant. This does not happen to all of them.

Deciding which is which is the really interesting part. Even on Google now I
often find myself pruning things that are more than 2 years old. But they can
just give a higher weight to its freshness score (something they showed that
is very important to them on their paper on Percolator).

~~~
smoody
"Even on Google now I often find myself pruning things that are more than 2
years old."

Google's time-based searching (hidden beneath the "More Search Tools" sidebar
link) is the greatest thing to happen to programming in years, I depend on it
daily.

To the OP: Completely agree. Marking something on a bookmarking service is
more akin to toe tagging than "save for later." I would gladly welcome a
browser extension that would put matching bookmarks (on Diigo in my case) at
the top of my google search results.

