Comment by zzalpha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zzalpha | Hacker News Reader

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As far as I can tell it's all about depth-first vs breadth-first.

I find the same people that like to open lots of tabs also prefer tabs that open in the background.

Why?

Because the browse breadth first. They'll be reading something and in the midst of it, see something they want to dig into, and open a new tab while continuing on the page they're currently on. This repeats a few times, and then once done with that content they go the next level down. Then lather-rinse-repeat. This causes a queue of pages to form (and BTW, for you programming newbies out there, this is a great way to visualize how recursion-less breadth-first tree traversal works).

I tend to be much more depth-first. When I open a tab, it's because I want to start exploring what's in that page. So I always have my browser focus new tabs (and screw you, Chrome, for only making that possible through an extension...). Then I'll pop back out and continue. In that model, you can just throw tabs away as you're done with them.

This is broadly my process, too.

I'll do a search, and background-open all of the results that seem responsive as I skim them, to read in depth once I think I've found "enough". Most of them of course get closed quickly upon ... uh, tabbing to them, because they weren't as material as I'd thought from the summary.

Then, sometimes (read: often), I'll recurse.

This way, in my experience, I tend to find more (as in quantity) relevant info, from which I can sieve quality of info, than if I were to serialize my search, going depth-first.

YM, as always, MV.

I strongly suspect this depends on a) the person and how they process information, and b) the kind of research being performed.

Usually when I'm researching, it's typically because I'm searching for the solution to a problem. In that case, a large quantity of information isn't useful. I just need an answer, not a survey of all possible answers. So once I find it, I can abort the search. Researching breadth-first may cause me to build up a queue of tabs unnecessarily.

If, on the other hand, I was researching to synthesize large quantities of data from multiple sources, absolutely your workflow makes a lot of sense.

I wonder if Google has enough data to look at the search history of (150+) tab users and make a correlation with mental health searches.

I've often felt that the number of tabs I have open was both a symptom of ADD and something that made it worse.

> Usually when I'm researching, it's typically because I'm searching for the solution to a problem.

I find that when I'm searching for a/any solution to a (specific) problem - "depth first" will be ok. But I'm usually searching for the best solution to a problem - and then I find that I normally have to "skim wide" - partly to figure out if I'm looking at the wrong problem (it's just a symptom of something else), and partly because something like 80% of stuff that I find online is outdated, wrong, not-well researched or all of the above.

> I just need an answer, not a survey of all possible answers

For me, sometimes when I need a direct answer, none of the answers found are that direct. Sometimes I look at an answer, gauge the effort it would take to investigate if that would work (code changes, whatever) then move on to see if there's an easier answer to verify. When I run out of those options, then I want to come back to this answer and try it. Doing this it's pretty easy to get my number of tabs up pretty high!

On the other hand, for research, yes, lots of tabs are the norm.

Yes, this breadth-first description is a good way to characterize my reason for having lots of tabs (though I don't have nearly as many as some people here say they have).

One additional factor is that I think I was trained to do that by slowly-loading websites. If I open a site in a new background tab, it can go about loading as slowly as it wants, and it'll be ready by the time I get around to reading it (I guess this would be ruined by lazy loading tabs...).

Try using Pilgrim[0] if it's breadth you're concerned with. It's a simple reader bookmarklet that also creates a linked map of all links in a page[1], letting you visualize the breadth of linked info in a tree and glide back and forth between them in a simple way.

I just found it today and already I love it.

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0. http://pilgrim.are.na/ 1. http://i.imgur.com/z78eybj.png

Kudos for the great explanation!

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