I Don’t Use Bookmarks

I don’t believe in bookmarking things. I used to bookmark websites in my browser like crazy. Then one day I realized that I was never using those bookmarks. Even worse was the realization that with my bookmarks I was building a private index of the Internet. And there was already this really good index out there called Google… So I stopped bookmarking. My life became much simpler. My collection of bookmarks dropped to almost zero.

Instead of digging through bookmarks (which I wasn’t doing anyway) I’d google for a term that I remembered had given me the results I wanted in the past. If that sounds like more work than using bookmarks, let me assure you that it isn’t. Once you collect a non-trivial number of bookmarks you have to categorize them and remember that hierarchy. Which is directly equivalent to just remembering what you typed in. If you think of your bookmark category and bookmark name as a key to lookup your desired results, then you can think of your search term in the same way. And generally your search term is easier to remember. In fact, you don’t even have to remember it: For whatever reason, when I find myself googling for a piece of information I invariably type in the same query or nearly the same query that I typed in last time. Even if months or years have transpired. When your “key” is so directly and humanely tied to what you want it works so much better.

My google-not-bookmarks strategy has served me well for about 6 or 7 years. Lately though, I’ve noticed that Google results have begun to fluctuate dramatically from day to day depending on the topic and the query I provide. So while my search terms haven’t changed much, the results have changed. Lucky for me that my browser remembers (and highlights) which links I’ve already visited, otherwise this system may have broken down for me a long time ago.

I don’t think anything crazy has happened at Google. Instead, the things I tend to repeatedly search for are in a narrow niche of geekdom. I’m sure this has been a problem for a long time for people who regularly google more popular topics. Only as the size of the Internet has increased – and therefore the size of the searchable content – has my neck of the woods finally been impacted.

To some extent this constant change is a good thing. Google offers a hybrid of fresh content and relevant results. So you can watch a topic for changes. You can even google yourself. In fact the how-to-blog crowd widely recommends that you google yourself often to see what people are saying about you online. (They don’t mention how unsatisfying that act is when no one knows who the hell you are and therefore no one is talking about you. Still, were someone to talk about me, Google would tell me all about it.)

On the other hand, I’m losing my auxiliary brain a little bit more every day. For instance, I sometimes have trouble remembering how to make a tarball. I don’t like the two-step process where you make a tar file then you compress it. Instead, I like a nice clean one-liner. Modern tar provides a compression option and will kick out a tidy *.tgz file for you. If only you know the magic command-line options and parameter sequence to get it to do that. Sadly, I never remember. So this is something I google for fairly often. Just in the past week I’ve had to google for this twice. And I know I googled for it a month or two back. And each time found markedly different results. I don’t even know where the site I found a few months ago is, but it isn’t in my search results anymore. At least not on that first page. Sadly, that site from a few months ago had the best instructions for making a tarball.

I guess I should have bookmarked it.