In my last post I argued that online bookmarking services (delicious, simpy, ma.gnolia et al.) are the wrong tool for remembering web pages with no clear future usage.
I guess the altered xkcd comic sums it up best:
As a consequence I just considered solutions that don’t make me decide which page I want to store and which not. Everything has to be stored automatically for me.
I guess everyone has about 5 web entry points where he starts 95% of his web browsing. My web entry points are:
If all those web entry points are searchable I can track down 95% of any web site I ever visited – granted that I remember how I got to the web site I’m trying to recall (which seems no problem to me).
Of all my web entry points only bloglines has no such thing (I know that google reader has it, if only it could store password protected feeds). Google has google search history, reddit has a – although slow – search (Google’s always an alternative) and it allows me to list all my up/downmodded links (which is quite probably also something I remember). Skype has got a good search (if I remember in which channel the link was posted, which is often not the case) and finally there are enough online mail providers (such as Gmail) and server side mail programs (such as Zimbra) available that offer good search facilities.
Pros/Cons:
Searching for things where you found it on seems very natural to me
you miss the 5%: The link your colleague told you, the news site you check too irregularly to remember, the url you typed in from an advertisement
the refind process is often quite cumbersome
If your problem is that you use different computers – one at home, one at work – and therefore lose your history every time you switch computers Google browser sync might be a solution. This firefox plugin syncs your browser history, (that means when you start typing into the url field it behaves the same on all synced computers) your bookmarks and optionally your passwords. In the end it really feels like all firefox installations have the same state.
You might scream “privacy!” at this point which is solved quite well for my taste: You can encrypt your browser data right from when it leaves your browser and it is stored encrypted on Google’s servers. They promise they don’t decrypt your data using your password which seems quite fair to me.
Pros/Cons:
it solves recalling links within the last few days (which might be just what you want)
you can’t go back more than the number of days back you set your firefox history settings (which you might set to 999 days). This might not be a big disadvantage as the value of a bookmark vanishes over time: As soon as you forgot that you have bookmarked a certain page this bookmark is of no value to you anyway (I quickly skimmed through 100 of my delicious bookmarks from 2 years ago: I remember only 8% of the pages I bookmarked)
your search in firefox history is restricted to just the page titles – which might be not enough (and too many web sites still have meaningless titles)
When you have google firefox toolbar installed and you have pagerank activated in your options your browser sends every loaded url to a Google server. Then on Google history you have a fulltext search over all the websites you ever visited.
Pros/Cons:
having a fulltext search over all visited pages is pretty neat.
it is a privacy nightmare. Google will use this data to improve their services.
your searches are restricted to the public web. Sites from your intranet or any service you need to login (such as your feed aggregator) are not searchable.
the web site you visited might have changed (such as the reddit frontpage or your local newspaper site) and the web site as you saw it is no longer in Googles indexes
the search is quite slow (compared to google web search)
Another one from Google: Google Desktop is known for it’s capability to search files on your computer. Apart from this, Google Desktop also stores all the web pages you visit with your browser. That is the content of the page you really looked at, not the page that is in the Google cache. And this is quite an improvement to “Google history”:
Google desktop lets you access the data in index in many ways:
And it solves the problem with multiple browsers with the ability to sync you indexes via a Google Server (Windows only, Linux is still lacking that feature, you can ‘vote’ for that feature.)
Pros/Cons:
Gogole Desktop is “Google history” without the disadvantages
The software is proprietary, you don’t really know what’s going on, you need to trust Google (there are alternatives: Beagle (Linux only) and Slogger (just saves your browser history, lacks a search frontend)
Your history data is locked in. The cache lives in a binary file on your harddisk
That said I still find Google Desktop very neat. Although I just have tested it for two weeks it greatly served me for accessing web documents more quickly and without the saving effort needed on online bookmarking services.
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I just want to know if there is a back tracking software that can browse back all the websites that you have visited many years ago, ranging from 7 years to 10 years or more ago. Do you know of such a software? BackBrowse is like that but applicable only on Mac computers. I want to know if a similar software is available for users who uses microsoft windows using computers, is there such a software? If so, then please inform me of their website address and name of the software itself.
Comment by starfleet — December 17, 2007 2:12 am #comment-103366
The problem in your case is most probably not the software but the data. Internet Exporer and Firefox have a cache of visited sites as well as a history of visited urls. But this data doesn’t go back for longer than 1 year. So your data is most probably lost.
Comment by Philipp Keller — December 17, 2007 9:31 pm #comment-103472
Firefox stores history in an sqlite db so merge that with an archive db and nothing is lost ever.
I tried using the Firefox addressbar search, but i can hardly remember the title of a page…
My desktop search is beagle. Although it finds really very much entries, when i type “bookmark alternatives” this page is listed first so seems to work nicely. And when i remember the conversation i got the link from i can search chatlogs.
Fortunately i don’t have too much bookmarks. And the bookmarks are tagged intelligently (which means:works for me) and i can find everything quickly.
Comment by Bernhard H. — October 22, 2008 4:39 pm #comment-130011