Until recently I had well over 1000 bookmarks which were centrally located in my online bookmark manager (Linkagogo). I had loads of items I’ve bookmarked and never accessed again, so during the last year I’ve been using Furl, Yahoo! MyWeb and del.icio.us for storing pages and tagging content. I also relied on recently introduced search histories provided by Google and Yahoo. In the past few months the variety of places I used to store information caused a small chaos and often frustration, I was getting slower in finding the information I knew I once accessed so it was time for reorganizing the process.

Having been used all of the mentioned services, I settled for the following:

• I’m now using bookmarks only for pages which I access on a regular basis
• I continue to use Linkagogo to synchronize bookmarks across browsers
• I use Furl for storing interesting pages and tagging them with keywords
• I do most of my online searching through Google, with the search history enabled

Of course, this process is complemented with numerous RSS feeds I track through my feed reader.

Bookmarks

I now have only around 150 bookmarks. They consists strictly of links to the sites I visit on a regular basis (such as online services, forums, my websites, etc). The hierarchy is at most 2 levels deep, is very intuitive and I’m now taking full advantage of Opera’s nicknames.

Saving pages

I have moved all other previously bookmarked items to Furl, which is now the core component of my web usage. I save every interesting page I stumble upon and tag it if needed. The search is fast and flexible (can search through pages’ full content, keywords only, etc). Furl allows me to export bookmarks if I ever want to switch to another service, provides means to download the complete content of “my personal web file” (that’s quite cool) and provides an RSS feed of my public links. I’ve added Furl as an Opera search item (URL=http://www.furl.net/search?enc=UTF-8&search=true&showRead=all&keyword=%s), so my saved pages are just an “f whatever” away. Yes, I love shortcuts .

In case you wonder why I didn’t go for Yahoo’s MyWeb - the main reason is that it doesn’t have the exporting flexibility of Furl. Jeremy Zawodny mentions that it does offer export through an RSS feed, but we all know that that’s not what export is.

Search History

I quite liked Yahoo’s search history, but some of the things that bothered me about it is that I would often find it turned off (hence missing some of the searches). I sometimes find it difficult to navigate through their pages and they don’t always render correctly in Opera. On the other hand, Google’s search history just works and it does so unobtrusively. I rarely search through the search history, but it is good to know that all of my searches are there in case the need arises.