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Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

That was true five years ago maybe, but these days Google is pretty much a cesspool. It often takes me over an hour just to find something vaguely related to what I'm looking for, even if I remember three or four different strings from the page.

Especially for things like academic journal articles, if you don't bookmark it then it's pretty much gone forever.

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You would like http://historio.us/

It often takes me over an hour just to find something vaguely related to what I'm looking for, even if I remember three or four different strings from the page.

I find that hard to believe. Can you give me an example?

I saw a writeup of a journal article just a few months ago about how there is a lot of randomness in how academic grants are distributed. They basically created several different panels of the people who write the grants and gave them each the same proposals to review, and there was an enormous variance between the proposals each panel funded. I think this was for NSF grants, but I'm not sure. Anyway I can't for the life of me find either the writeup or the journal article.

Similarly, I heard a story on NPR about a research study that found the best predictor of how much 8th graders would earn as adults wasn't race, gender, IQ, grades, or anything else like that, but rather was how much they thought they would earn as adults. Can't for the life of me find that one either.

In fact there is an entire field of research that's disappeared. I know for a fact that there is a field that's basically scientists researching scientists/science, but I can't find more than a couple of the papers in this field or even the appropriate wikipedia articles.

For your latter query this research from December 2010 seems to be connected - http://www.princeton.edu/~angelh/Website/Studies/Article%201...

This connects uncertain career aspirations at age 16 to wage attainment at age 26.

Have you tried a Google Scholar search? That's what it's tailor-made for; I remember it having a few search quality issues when I was in college, but if I was looking for academic work, that was the first place I'd go.

AFAIK Scholar also doesn't push more often than once every couple of years, so you can be fairly sure it wasn't broken by a recent ranking change, and what you see now is what you would've gotten in 2005, modulo additional articles published.

Yes, I tried Google scholar and couldn't find what I was looking for. Maybe I've just outgrown Google?

A big one for me is recipes. I find a great peach cobbler recipe, but if I don't bookmark it, it is tough to find again. Because a search for peach cobbler recipe comes back with hundreds of pages, each page has tens of different links to peach cobbler reciples. And remembering things like, "butter,sugar" don't really help.

Before content farmer doomsday:

I would find a jQuery plugin that's actually small, useful, and without 100+ custom attributes. I love it and didn't bookmark it thinking that Google will give it back to me again.

Next time I search using the exact same keywords, I got: "Top 25 jQuery plugins blogspam you never heard about!"

Google failed to deliver THAT plugin that I searched before.

Care to try http://mybucket.co? When you found that precious article, it's a bookmarklet click away.

And tagging is not a chore at all, simple use #hashtag in the description.

Why should I use it over Firefox's native bookmarks?

I asked that question for myself, and the answer (for me) is because of the hassle of switching browsers.

I switch browsers somewhat often, and I'd like to have all my bookmarks in the same place (not to mention the terror of migrating all bookmarks when getting new laptop). That's the main reason.

And of course there are little reasons such as:

  * native bookmark doesn't give me preview or little snippet of what the link is about.

  * I want to replay Freddie Mercury songs on YouTube in loop.

  * It's always a pain to download photos of myself, tagged by family on Facebook.

Firefox sync means I don't have to worry about losing my bookmarks, and I doubt I'm going to use anything but Firefox for a long while. Your other points are interesting, but I don't really see how they beat the awesomebar integration Firefox has.

Firefox 4 + Sync (Slurp to get the bookmarks out of delicious). Additionally, use Dropbox or SugarSync to backup bookmarks folder. With 5 copies of backed up bookmarks, you'll be covered from all sides.

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