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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

In the old days of the web, before CSS became widespread, all links were blue by default and turned purple when visited. Back then people would also bookmark things and organize their bookmarks.

Somewhere along the line, we stopped caring about trying to manage our own information and handed it over to big cloud companies like Google and Facebook. Now we’re seeing the downsides of that tradeoff.

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While I'm preety deep in the camp of those who don't want or let google save their history, I didn't stop caring about managing my own information, I just gave up. The amount of info I'm processing today is on a different scale than it used to be on the good old days, and the tools we have - browser history for instance - just didn't scale.

I wish we had a middle ground between browser history and favourites - just a way to preferentially find something I’ve visited and tagged before by keyword that works in the address bar. “What was the name of that one article Among hundreds from 3 months ago about X...”

Something like Pinboard?

https://pinboard.in/

Pinboard is a bookmarking solution, not a middle ground between bookmarks and browser history.

Perhaps session buddy, if you're the type to have a bunch of tabs on a topic. You can search for names of sessions, or for pages in a saved session.

The Firefox address bar doesn't let you tag things by keyword afaik, but it is pretty good at pulling up articles based on both their URL and title. It's definitely improved my ability to go back and find stuff from a few weeks or months back.

You definitely can tag bookmarks in Firefox, and typing the tag will bring up that item.

Adding a tag to bookmark: https://i.imgur.com/iVElOWb.png

Searching by tag: https://i.imgur.com/e3UmQDG.png

I don't use any bookmark management addons, so this is definitely default behaviour.

One feature I've wanted since forever is a full text search engine of only stuff I've previously seen before. I've spent hours typing in various search queries for an article I'm sure I read 3 years ago but am fuzzy on the details of. Doesn't seem too hard to do technologically and would solve a real problem in my life.

I am currently evaluating worldbrains memex for firefox. It let's you full text search your visited sites the results can also be included in a google search via the plugin. Sites can be annotated, tagged.

Giving up is the same thing as stopped caring!

The tools that were developed in the interim were designed not to scale.

When I said we, I meant all of us, including developers. Economic forces had a lot to do with it, of course, but developers flocked to SaaS business models and away from traditional native apps. This is a huge loss for user control of their data.

Imagine if that hadn't happened! I think we would have amazing tools for managing our information locally, in a highly automated and intuitive way.

The seeds of these possibilities are everywhere. Search, of course, but also things like tagging and even automatic tagging with with machine learning models. Imagine if Chrome had the same tools for organizing bookmarks as Gmail has for tagging email, plus all of the power of recommendation engines under the user's control.

No, instead Google keeps bookmarks extremely underpowered because they'd rather have people search for everything all the time in order to drive traffic to their ads.

It's not just bookmarks. I didn't realize for a long time that chrome was silently deleting my browsing history. Now I bookmark anything that seems even vaguely interesting, which in turn makes my address bar suggestions less than useful.

The web back then was also useless.

I know because I was there trying to learn programming, or anything, from the web of 1996-2000 and it was a freaking pain, a garbage dump of poor content filled with banner ads and popups and searching on AltaVista and Yahoo! was completely futile. The only useful content I found was not on the web, but in FTP directories. And learning was all you could (barely) do.

People were doing bookmarks because it was rare to find something good, so remembering stuff that wasn't crap was worthwhile.

People tend to glorify the old days. That's because memory starts playing tricks on us.

Only in the very early days of the web, were links standardized around blue/purple text, and even linked images had blue/purple borders.

But quickly web designers decided that the conventions were boring or ugly, and changed the default color schemes and removed underlines and borders. The web as a whole began moving towards CSS and JavaScript and more full-fledged web applications.

Putting the disappearance of purple links on cloud companies and Facebook and Google is rather preposterous.

Parent is talking about physical location.

https://www.google.ca/maps/timeline

That particularly useful thing got taken away from us because it was too hard to hide the changed-appearance from predatory trackers who would link to many websites to determine if you'd been there before.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Privacy_and...

Not all of us. Cloud-based bookmarking services are great. I use https://pinboard.in/

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