Wandering electrons... but not too far

Well, if you know the website by name, you should be able to find it easily in your bookmarks and spare Google a hit (hint: Opera has a searchbox in Manage Bookmarks). Besides, when *I* search a site by name in Google, it's often the third, fourth or fifth result. Definitely not the first. How soon until it's the 11th, and thus doesn't even show up on the first page anymore?

And now... replace "browser" with "os", "bookmarks" with "office documents" and "Google Search" with "Google Docs". Sounds familiar?

I have been thinking the same a few times lately. I have lost all my bookmarks a few times in my life, but at the current time, I don't really miss them, which should be answer enough, though I haven't really made up my mind as of yet. Need to think it through first.

But I do use a nicknames quite often. And they are a bookmark feature. I have about 15 nick names I use daily:

my = My.opera.com
g = google
m = live search

and so on. I could not live without them. It makes my browser life a lot less stressing by letting me use the keyboard much more than my mouse by pressing Ctrl+L to go to the address bar, then just write the nick and hit enter.

I also have a set of bookmarks to blogs, news pages I visit more or less daily. Googling for them every day would be a hassle. But I guess RSS could one day kill all of those bookmarks as well, unless some Mircroformat beats it to it.

One random idea that just poppet up in my mind just now would be to use bookmarks as your own search engine. It would beat Googling on both speed as well as relevance. It could work like the history search in Opera, but only search on those pages bookmarked. You would only get interesting search result, but not necessary relevant hits. I guess this could be improved, but need to sit on that one for a bit.


- ØØ -

I use bookmarks for three things:
1) Pages that I find interesting and to which I could get back in future.
This is a sort of selective persistent history.
These pages aren't easy to find with google when, one month later, I vaguely remember them and want to get back to them, without remembering anything specific.
These pages aren't "my favorites", as I almost never open them.

Not only is it more persistent and pertinent (the history is full of irrelevant pages) than the history, but I also classify with a few folders. For example, I currently put everything related to Opera in an "Opera" folder.

With that, I never loose any page that I found interesting.

Now, I tend to bookmark every page on which I spent more than a few seconds except for discussion forums.
I systematically bookmark every page that I entirely read as well as pages that I think I'll entirely read some day.

2) Putting together a set of pages related to a single technology that I found at various places on the Web (i.e. many different domain names) but that I want to be able to access all at the same time because every of them alone contains too little information while all of them together are enough to work on the matter.
I just put them together in a bookmark folder.

3) Pages that I want to access with a nickname. Only my most favorite pages get a nickname. For pages that I use less, I type the URI in the address bar manually.

I don't use Google for my favorites. I don't want to eat resources of Google and give them information about my navigation for laziness that wouldn't even save my time.
I use google only to search the Web for new content that I cannot easily access through a database.
For example, I don't use Google when I want to read a specific RFC. I just enter ietf.org/rfc/rfcNNNN.txt in the address bar.
(I should add it as search engine).

One real benfit is if you "browse". Browsing is very different from searching or typing a web address in. A browser does not offer many opportunities to actually browse. If you navigate through your bookmark folders you will see many pages that you had forgotten were there on that subject. You may not need to click on them, but you have seen them and later that will come in handy as you have them fresh in your mind. That is browsing!
This applies if you collect bookmarks and organise them well.
Remember, You can open up a folder full of bookmarks in 2 seconds. Try that on google!

Originally posted by Clear%20Wine:

Remember, You can open up a folder full of bookmarks in 2 seconds. Try that on google!

This is true!

Try that on google!

ok, but don't try this at home...

Ctrl+t           [Open new tab]
g MySearchTerm   [Search google for what you want]
Shift+Ctrl+9     [Open link panel]
Ctrl+a           [Select all links]
Ctrl+Shift+Enter [Open all links in background]

*..silence for quite a while while all pages, as well as cached pages opens* Think a UserJs excluding the "cached pages" and "similar pages" would have done it a bit more painless, but I am starting to get used to have my bookmarks in folder again (instead of del.icio.us, although yesterday evening Opera started to make double folders/bookmarks after syncing yesterday. And they won't go away.


- ØØ -

Thanks NoteMe. I meant opening a collection of links that may have different search strings, where you've spent time collecting them, navigating to the relevant page, and then put them together in a folder.

But back to the sentiment of this thread, I'm sure there are a class of sites that favour the google approach. And other links you keep safely because, if you lose it, you feel you'll never find it again.

Another use is for citation and pointers: I have a Frequently Linked Posts subfolder in my Opera folder, with for example links to WE's blog items on tooltip suppression and making favicons. Lowers the cost of citation, makes it happen more: which is good.