Ask HN: How to make bookmarks useful.
Say I'm debugging my halting_problem_decider.cc when I get some obscure compiler error. Googling it, I somehow stumble on a site that offers all of Britney Spears's music for download--a true diamond in the rough for a true britney fan (assume I know nothing of bittorrent). I'm absolutely ecstatic, but since my boss wants the halting problem solved by lunchtime, I must restrain myself to bookmarking it for future enjoyment and return to work.
Years later I'm looking for an mp3 version of "you drive me crazy" (still no bittorrent). By then I've forgotten all about the life-changing site I had discovered in my youth. So instead of going directly to it, I'm ignorantly wading through bait-and-switch-type ad-infested sites purporting to have my song for download. Meanwhile the site I need is uselessly taking up space in my bookmarks, never to be used again.
In effect the problem is this: it's not enough to store useful resources if you don't remember to use them. Bookmarks store things, but they don't remind you of the things you've stored (address bar autocomplete is a first-approximation solution to this problem).
Possible solution: Since my go-to place for anything is Google, why not bring my bookmarks to it? That way when I google "you drive me crazy mp3", the site I serendipitously found years ago will float at the top of the search results. One possible implementation of this could use Google custom search to index personal bookmarks. But this would merely create a separate Google for your bookmarks instead of bringing your bookmarks to /The/ Google. Another, more promising approach would be to use subscribed links (http://www.google.com/coop/docs/subscribedlinks).
Before I waste a weekend on this only to reinvent the wheel: Anyone seen anything like this? Any suggestions? (and can you help me debug my halting problem solver?!!)