I recently made the transition from Furl to Spurl for storing online content. In case you’re new to these services, they are social bookmark managers that, apart from simply bookmarking (like del.icio.us), store full page contents on their servers, allowing for quick searches in the future. Like all other social bookmark managers they allow you to share your bookmarks and provide all sorts of RSS feeds, although they are not as flexible as del.icio.us is in this area.

Both Furl and Spurl perform their job well in the basic areas of online bookmarking with content saving:

• Cross browser compatibility. Both services have bookmarklets for adding pages which are supported across a wide variety of browsers (IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc).
• Keep a snapshot of the webpage even if the page is no longer available online.
• Search through your archive (all the content you’ve ever saved).
• Search by keywords (tags).
• Search by category.
• Search through other peoples archives (public content only).
• Share bookmarks with other users.
• Export your public bookmarks (all or categories) as an RSS feed or to a blog (Javascript).
• Provide “Recommended Links” based on the content you bookmarked.

Furl advantages over Spurl:

• Furl allows you to export your archive. This includes the content of all the bookmarked pages (in a zip file). Spurl only allows you to export the bookmarks without the content.
• Furl has an option to set the default status of items to “private”. With Spurl, you have to explicitly set the item as private when bookmarking it.
• You can rate the pages you furl. This is a nice thing to have when browsing through your archive (you can sort by ratings).
• Cleaner interface. I think Furl is easier to use for non-techies (my wife uses it).

Spurl advantages over Furl:

• del.icio.us integration. When you add a bookmark to Spurl, it automatically gets added to your del.icio.us account (optional).
• Spurl offers an API. This is very important for the future of the service.
• Spurl offers a cool sidebar panel for IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari. This makes searching and browsing Spurl much quicker and easier.
• You can create subcategories.

Feature wise, it is quite a close match. I decided to move to Spurl due to delicious integration, the sidebar panel and the fact that since LookSmart acquired Furl over a year ago, there has been almost no improvements made to the service. Spurl feels much more open and the people behind it appear to be more dedicated to their idea than Furl guys and that’s the type of service I give my trust to.

A note on the move itself. I exported all the bookmarks from Furl and imported them into Spurl. The import took around a day (this is a security not a performance issue) and all the pages were correctly indexed. The bad thing is that my furl tags have been lost in this transition. I wish these services started using a better format for import/export which would contain some meta data.

Another player in this area is Yahoo’s MyWeb, but I’ve dismissed it since it is not elegant to use and lacks openness and some essential stuff such as categories. No, tags are not enough!

Tags: Furl, Spurl, MyWeb, del.icio.us

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.

My major complaint about Yahoo’s My Web beta service was that it’s Save functionality was unusable in browsers other than IE and Firefox. Well, they now provide a bookmarklet for other browsers. Works great in Opera. Thanks Yahoo!

Tags: Yahoo, My Web, Bookmarklet

Spacilus is a new interesting application which acts as a proxy and tries to categorize Google search results in order to eliminate unwanted items (spam, scraper sites, etc).

Spacilus uses Bayesian statistics to categorize search results. Put simply, Bayesian classification looks at the joint probabilities of a search results words and phrases to belong to a certain category. For example, a search result that contains a phrase like “price comparison” will most likely belong to a category “Commercial” or “Spam” rather than to a category “Informative”.

Opera is well known for its powerfull and flexible little search box. It comes with several predefined search engines, but allows you to add any other engines you want. For example, I have Yahoo!, Google, LinkaGoGo, Technorati, Dictionary.com, Wikipedia and WebMasterWorld searches defined for easy access. Even better, Opera has a feature known as Super Search. When invoked, it will perform the search on the first two defined search engines and display the results in two windows arranged side by side. Much like Yagoohoo!gle (aka Twingine.com and Jaguhugel.com) does. However, with Opera you can compare any two engines side by side, for example Yahoo and MSN, Google and AllTheWeb, etc.

So, how do you activate the super search? The safest way is to download the Opera Search.ini Editor, place your two primary search engines at positions 1 and 2 (for example, Yahoo! and Google), then add a new search named “Super, int” which you will find in the list of search engines in the Search.ini Editor. Save your changes, type in something in the Opera search box, select the Super search and enjoy!

Tags: Opera, Search

The guys at RustyBrick are performing a search engine relevancy challenge. RustyBrick decided to build a white-labeled search engine that pulled results randomly from one of the major four search engines. Everyone is invited to rate the search results and on June 1st they will publish the results of the study. You decide which search engine is best!

Oh, and here you can see some very early results. Quite a close race…

Having been converted from Yahoo to Google for searches in the late 90’s, I’m finding myself using Yahoo more and more again. Is Yahoo search really that good and comparable with Google? Well, check out for yourself with this cool graphical tool.

Yahoo has launched a new beta service called My Web. The service represents a mix of Furl, Googles My Search History and an online bookmark service. This is how it works: you search through Yahoo and all your searches get saved (if you turn the My Search History feature on), then when you find something interesting you click the “Save” button which saves the copy of the page in your “personal web” and, optionally, your bookmarks get updated too. Oh, and it allows all sorts of public sharing, including RSS. Really nice one, Yahoo!

Here’s some info directly from “My Web”:

My Web Beta is a free service from Yahoo! Search. It enables you to save a live link and a personal cached copy of any web page from the Yahoo! Toolbar or directly from search results, and instantly retrieve it online from any computer.

With My Web you can:

Build your own personal, password-protected collection of favorite web pages.

Instantly search all My Web saved pages using the power of Yahoo! Search.

Organize your saved pages into folders.

Personalize site titles and add notes to help you remember pages.

Email and share your favorite saved pages with friends and colleagues.

My Web is better than bookmarks:

It saves a cached copy and a link of the page.

It’s searchable. You don’t need to organize your collection –although you can if you want to.

It’s accessible online anywhere, not just from your computer.

My Web lets you rest-assured that the pages you want to see will be there ––whenever you want to revisit them.

Read more from the Yahoo Search Blog.

Google has today launched a very cool new (beta) service called My Search History.

“My Search History lets you easily view and manage your search history from any computer. This feature of Google web search enables you to find information you thought you lost. And over time, you’ll see an increasing number of relevance indicators in your search results that help you find the information you want.”

This is something I often wished for and I’m sure it will prove very handy in the years to come. Too bad it doesn’t yet work with Opera 8.

LinkaGoGo is a powerful online bookmark manager. I’ve been using it since 2002 on a regular basis and it is a truly remarkable service.

This tip will show you how to search your LinkaGoGo bookmarks from your Opera address or search bar without having to go to the Linkagogo site to invoke the search. This will work only for LinkaGoGo members, which starts at $3.95/year.

To add this search close Opera, find your Opera profile (same place where your adr file is located) and backup your search.ini file. Open the original and add the following:

[Search Engine [ID]]
Name=LinkaGoGo
URL=www.linkagogo.com/go/Search?search=%s
Query=
Key=L
Encoding=utf-8
Is post=0
Has endseparator=0
Search Type=0
VerbText=17063

Change [ID] with the first free search engine ID. Save the file, open Opera and type “L whatever” in your address bar and magic - your bookmarks that contain “whatever” are displayed in the browser. You can also perform the search by typing the text in the Opera search combo and select “LinkaGoGo” from the list of search engines.

If you don’t feel comfortable editing search.ini yourself, you can use the great Opera search.ini editor from this site.

Tags: LinkaGoGo