Ask HN: How do you all manage your bookmarks? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you all manage your bookmarks?

10 pointsjohnnykree13 comments

Hello. I have about 380 bookmarks and all are in a clean folder system… and every time I’m trying to find something I just can’t find it and I usually just google for it because looking for it in my browsers bookmarks (Safari) just takes too long.

What are you all doing to manage your bookmarks?

View on HN

It is a very interesting question why the world hasn’t seen a good “bookmark manager” or “history browser”. Usually the experience is that it is a roach motel, you put bookmarks in but never actually get them out. As you say the “clean folder system” just doesn’t work.

There are many products with such a history of failure that it is rumoured there is no way you could get funding to develop them, bookmark managers are that. Particularly if your product depends on close integration with Chrome or Safari you’d expect Big Tech to shut you down any time they like and I am not so sure about Firefox although after integrating the thoroughly hated Pocket they might not want to try again. On the other hand “… but with AI” is fashionable today and actually plausible.

I have an “intelligent RSS reader” which does classification of articles to show me ones I like, I forked the code for that to make an “image sorter” which has a sort of “bookmark manager” in the sense that I find an image gallery I am interested in, click on a bookmarklet which cues a web crawler to import all the images and the metadata, then there is a tagging system where I can classify the images which has been highly successful. I forked it again to make something to organize the notes in somebody’s Evernote notebook (and download all the web pages that are referenced) and I’m also looking to download about 6000 search results from PubMed on a certain condition and pick out the interesting ones, make a list of researchers in the field, etc.

What I have therefore is a “construction kit” to build systems that systematize document processing and one of the many things I could do is put together the bookmark/document capture system with full text search, the BIGtags system and dense vector search and clustering which I think would be a nice product for me.

A product like this could be single user or cooperative, if you have tagged 1000 or so web pages I can get a good idea of what you like and offer recommendations but I think people are sick and tired of social media toxicity and products that want to shove unwanted content in your face. (e.g. Pocket)

I just give them clear names when I add them (sometimes including a keyword or two), and use the url bar to search them ('*' narrows results to bookmarks in Firefox. I presume there's something similar in Safari, Chrome, etc.)

I used to have a similar problem, so I decided to move to go through my bookmarks every couple of months and delete any that I haven't used since I last checked them. I now have about 20 bookmarks that get used regularly and anything else I'll just search for again.

I have a daily / weekly folder for things I check regularly. A folder for streaming/media. One for each of my hobbies, one for "random" which is everything I might want to reference later, but doesn't fit.

When I see something interesting, I just slap it in the root of the bookmarks bar. Every week or two, I re-visit those and either categorize them or delete them. A few times a year, I look at the random folder and decide if I still care about the content and either leave it or delete it. After all, if you don't keep coming back to it, you don't need to have bookmarked it.

if you have a fairly long history of links (like me, since 2012) that migrate from browser to browser, from one OS to another, get used to cleaning old links that you haven't used for more than a year, and believe me - you'll have less than a hundred links left ))) I'm not lying to you. when I found this habit useful - I realized that many things that happened before no longer interested me, sometimes links from online auctions or some one-time services are stored, which you won't visit again later, these are links just in case. but an opportunity never comes, and garbage accumulates. that's why I just recommend you start from the beginning and spend some time and delete the unnecessary, you'll be surprised at the result.

I don't bookmark things, I just try to remember the name of the thing I wanted and then I google it later

I name them properly and put in order when necessary. Makes them searchable in urlbox. Periodic sort and purge. Important/frequent goes into folders on the left, less important to the right. If I feel lazy, it always goes to “Sort” to not contaminate sorted folders.

I use Pinboard for managing bookmarks. The tag system is very nice!

Raindrop is another tool in that space, but I haven’t tried it.

https://pinboard.in/

https://raindrop.io/

Didn't pinboard fall off a while ago?

The site is up and running. But it’s hard to get in touch with the founder.

Every year I move a couple thousand bookmarks to my obsidian to make them easily searchable, then gradually move them to appropriate note.

Eventually it got so overwhelming that I started building an automatic bookmark tagger. Going to launch soon, waitlist in profile.

Tags + links as a strategy is very helpful.

Many of my bookmarks arent bookmarks at all—they’re urls tagged in my note taking app!

Raindrop.io

Reply on news.ycombinator.com