That’s the feeling that arises when I think of all the bookmark services out there that ought to file urls I somehow find notworthy so that I can quickly recall them afterwards: There’s too much clutter and the services are just too slow. Therefore I again begin to save my bookmarks at other places: In firefox or in some text documents lying somewhere on my hard drive (probably I should tag them?).

«I want it now»

As for myself, if I don’t get my data within a fraction of a second, I don’t feel that I have good access to my data. I think one of the best things of Google Web search is that it is incredible fast. Tag services are not. That’s a pity because within tag services I search my lowly amount of bookmarks (around 2000 bookmarks at that moment) whereas with Google I search the whole net. I often find myself at the situation searching for a url on Google rather than looking it up on my bookmark service. Even if I have to do 3 Google searches – I feel at control. If I have to wait for 3 seconds for an answer, that’s simply too much.

An experiment: I ran for ((i=0;i<10;i++)) do wget -q --user-agent="Mozille Firefox 1.9" $url; done; for the three big players in tagging services: 181del.icio.us, 182Simpy and 183Rawsugar. For $url I chose a page displaying all bookmarks saved with a certain tag. I also ran a query on Google for that “tag”. The numbers are number of seconds per query. The queries were run on different hosts with different internet connection, all in Switzerland.

I’m happy to see that with Rawsugar I’m with the fastest bookmark service (2 times faster than Delicious, 3 times faster than Simpy). On the other hand: all the bookmark services are at least 4 times slower than Google. I know that Google has set a high mark – but emotionally that’s the response time I’d like to have when querying for my data.

«I just want my bookmarks»

Have a look at the “result areas” (highlighted in green) of the three bookmark services.

Delicious: Result area in green

Simpy: Result area in green

Rawsugar: Result area in green

To come back to the comparison with the closet: Even if there are 20 magic hands with documents sticking out of the closet, it is crucial that the most important document is the one closest to my face. That means, when using those bookmark services, my eye should first notice the most important link. My opinion: The service that solves this best is Delicious. The results appear on the leftmost part of my screen and the result area covers 64% of the screen. Regarding that matter Rawsugar is far worse: My eye has to search for the first result. I find it natural to start reading at the left of the screen. But at Rawsugar there are so many links in the head of the page and then the left column helps me to refine the result – a great feature but at the wrong place – furthermore: if I want just get a link I know I filed under “important”, I don’t need this at all. Even Delicious’ “saved by xxx other people” – shaped in different colorings – is too much clutter for me. Maybe I’m a puritan but – what the heck – I just want my 9 bookmarks!

Beyond the criticism

Sorry to only criticize. I like those services a lot. They are helping organizing links and they are for free. To turn this post into a constructive comment, two possible solutions to the problems mentioned.

Bookmark services offer a «Minimal mode»

Yes, tagging is about collaboration. But I fear the personal value of tagging is too small – people might leave tagging services because they don’t feel their bookmark problem solved. There’s too much network and too many features. I propose a “minimal mode”, a result page that just shows select * from bookmarks where user="phred" and one_of_its_tags="important". In firefox there are 184Smart Keywords also known as “quick search”. I set up “myr” to search for my rawsugar bookmarks. Typing “myr important” into my location bar I end up on www.rawsugar.com/links/phred/important. If there would be a site on rawsugar that displays the same results just in this minimal mode, I would bend my smart keyword to this result page and would be happy.

Someone codes a «Tag agent»

I imagine a “tag agent” that has incredible response time and no clutter. It could either get the results via rss/api from the bookmark service or it could hold all my tagged bookmarks in it’s own database. Such an agent could be installed on a password-protected part of my website so I can access it from wherever I am. The problem is: I don’t have time to write an application my own. I have thought about such an application, I’ve got plenty of ideas how it should look but I’m afraid I won’t find time to code such an application. I repeatedly get emails from people writing yet another thesis on collaborative categorisation. Instead of writing about insights on the mental actions taking place while tagging – do the tagging world a favour and write such an agent. If there’s such a tag agent already, please leave a comment.

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What is the big difference between the three search engines?
Sure, there are different page ranks, according to google-watch there is

on average only a 20 percent overlap between Yahoo’s first 100 results and Google’s first 100 results for the same search

And ok, there are different sites they are searching through.
But why is MSN doing more or less the same thing with huge efforts what google has already done? Yesterday I wanted to search all swiss companies that use/develop semantic web. I can’t search for that! (if you know a site doing that, let me know!). Now what they do is a giant race and some small search will come and eat them all. Why don’t they invent some new? Never heard of Semantic Web? Sure they have! So why are they are doing the same thing again and again? I don’t get it.