everything that is wrong with bookmarks

February 15th, 2011

The history of bookmarks is one of those tragic stories in technology. When bookmarks were first introduced (by Netscape? or maybe it was Mosaic?) they were a huge step forward. Trying to memorize urls or writing them on paper clearly weren't methods that worked well. The idea -- and so simple too -- that the browser could remember the urls for you was the perfect solution.

Sadly, since the "big bang" of bookmarks there have been precious few new explosions.

The basic problem

The introduction of bookmarks, welcome as it was, created a problem that remains with us today. Once you start bookmarking pages, you inevitably produce a list of bookmarks that becomes more chaotic and less useful the longer it gets. Sure, a list of bookmarks is useful when you can look at it and quickly know what is there, and when you can see the bookmark you want to load right now.

But when you start having to scroll the list, and not only that but use the PageUp/PageDown keys to scroll the list quicker, it's a good sign that it's getting out of hand.

A collection of bookmarks is all well and good, but it needs some kind of structure superimposed on it to remain effective.

The bookmark toolbar

The bookmark toolbar encapsulates the insight that some bookmarks are more important than others and offers a number of improvements:

  1. Allows marking some bookmarks as more important/more frequently used.
  2. Gives them better visibility.
  3. Provides quicker access to them (by not having to go into the bookmark menu).

The bookmarks are displayed on a toolbar, either as links or as links-within-folders.

badbookmarks-toolbar

Despite how useful this feature is, browsers have historically treated it as something of a marginal feature. Firefox, for instance, used to view the launcher toolbar as just another folder in the bookmarks collection (albeit with a special name, like "Personal Toolbar Folder"), which you could accidentally rename or delete, and then it wouldn't show up as a toolbar anymore.

Another thing that matters a lot to the usability of the toolbar is the drag-and-dropability of bookmarks onto the toolbar, into the folders, and from one place to another. Even today, for instance, in Google Chrome I can't reorder the items in a folder on the toolbar without opening the Bookmark Manager.

Import/export (and the silo)

It hardly needs stating that once you have a bookmark collection in one browser, you don't want to manually recreate it if you decide to use another one. Browsers have historically been reluctant about giving out their bookmarks. All too often, despite making a show of offering to import your bookmarks from another browser, the import mechanism has bordered on the useless.

First and foremost, every browser vendor since the Ice Age has been eager to supply you with a tasty selection of bookmarks that he was convinced you would love. Importing your own bookmarks, therefore, could at best be seen as a supplement. No browser would ever just take your existing bookmarks and overwrite its own vendor-supplied ones, which is exactly what the user wants. Instead, it would stash them somewhere in the bookmark collection, well out of sight. Any additional metadata that was implicitly stored in your bookmarks would often be lost, like the order in which they were listed.

In particular, the browser would make no bones about trying to find out if you have a bookmark toolbar in there, and replace it with its own (despite the browser having a toolbar feature that worked exactly the same).

badbookmarks-ff-toolbar
badbookmarks-bad-import

So having done an "import", you would typically have to manually organize your bookmarks, nuke the stupid vendor bookmarks, and sometimes you'd even have to recreate the folder structure of your bookmark toolbar, all before you had been able to achieve the same state as in your other browser.

This kind of situation is standard silo behavior. By making the import feature so mediocre, the browser vendor would pretty much ensure that the user would not switch browsers without paying a high price for it. Simply using more than one browser on a daily basis, with an easy way to manage your bookmarks across them by a quick sync, is just not realistic.

Bookmark sync (and more silo)

A way of keeping your bookmarks synced across computers has been a no-brainer feature since the era when people started accessing the web both at home and at school/work. And yet, a working synchronization feature is a pretty recent development in bookmarks. I recall some failed attempts with Firefox extensions in the remote past, but at last it is here.

A number of browsers have a sync feature now, and it's a big step forward in bookmarks. Even if your bookmark collection is a mess, you can at least have the same mess all over the place. Clean it up and it's clean everywhere.

And yet, bookmark sync is yet more silo behavior: you can sync your bookmarks from Opera to Opera, but not from Opera to Firefox. The fact that bookmark sync doesn't do the same half-assed job of the import feature might seem strange, but the motive is very obvious:

  • ability to have your bookmarks up to date in our browser on every computer = good for the vendor
  • ability to have your bookmarks up to date in every browser = bad for the vendor

Browser vendors know very well that if bookmark sync worked as poorly as bookmark import, they couldn't sell it as a feature, because noone would use it.

Bad page titles

Strangely enough, I've come all this way without mentioning just about the most glaring problem that bookmarks have: bad page titles. Since the name of the bookmark is simply the title of the page in 99.99% of the cases, the title ought to be both descriptive and concise. Instead, we have historically seen that web creators much prefer titles that are variations on this theme:

The Excessively Long Title Of My Website Which Is Very Nice Indeed: Section Title: Article Title

With titles like that, all too often you can't even see the title of the article in your bookmark list, because the text is truncated somewhere in the middle.

Quite apart from the length problem, web sites often prefer to give articles catchy titles rather than descriptive ones. So with a title like:

Something Amusing That Makes You Think About What The Page Really Is About

you have the short term benefit of being amused at the cost of the long term benefit of a descriptive title.

Bad metadata

Bookmarks belong eminently to the category of things where the number of items is so large that it would be great to have a way of automating the retrieval/organization of the items.

Yet, despite announcements from Mozilla in the past that they would soon obliterate the old model of bookmarks-as-a-list, and introduce a new and all-conquering search based approach, we still have the list. The fact is that bookmarks don't contain enough metadata to make search useful. A bookmark has two pieces of data:

  1. The name of the bookmark.
  2. The url.

Sure, some browsers give you the option to store other things too, like tags, but if we all agree that the user can't be bothered to keep their bookmarks organized, let's not pretend he will actually input any of the optional stuff. And even if he does, 90% of his bookmarks won't have any other data associated with them, so we're back to the short list above.

So why doesn't search make sense? Because much too often neither the title nor the url contains any of the keywords that you would want to use in order to find this bookmark. Web sites don't pay too much attention to titles, and the real data that would be useful to search is the page itself, which is not available.

Bookmark oblivion

What should seem ironic is that bookmarking a page often has the effect of not bookmarking it at all. The bookmark is saved somewhere in the long list and then never seen again, either because the list is too long to really bother looking at beyond the most recently added items, or because the page title is useless, or because it was bookmarked "for future reference", and by the time we return to this topic we've forgotten about the bookmark.

We tend to grow pretty oblivious as to what's in our bookmarks. Over time, some pages expire, others drift out of our sphere of interest, yet the bookmark collection doesn't get updated.

Just about the most obvious feature a browser might offer is to try loading the bookmarks from time to time, in the background, and marking the ones that return 404.

Another idea might be to offer to list bookmarks according to how often they are loaded, making the never used ones fall to the bottom of the list. Applying this to the bookmark folder might be especially useful, so the user doesn't have to reorder the bookmarks to make the frequent ones quicker to reach.

:: random entries in this category ::

11 Responses to "everything that is wrong with bookmarks"

  1. Akku says:

    That pretty much nails it: Bookmarks suck. I'm using Bookmarks in the following way:

    - setup every page that I often need in the bookmark toolbar (or folders within)
    - and bury the rest in the list like you described

    Then when I need some info I type in the awesomebar of Firefox, and look at what bookmarks pop up. When nothing appropriate is there, I hit return. Google Get Lucky ftw.

    Which drives me to the solution and conclusion: Google is so damn good that just typing the best search terms that describe what you what mostly always directly take you to the solution. Bookmarks where a feature when Google wasn't that good.

  2. Dan Douglas says:

    I've been thinking about creating a cron that runs my netscape/html bookmark files through keditbookmarks and merges them together into XBEL format to then run an XSLT against to create a nicely organized homepage on a local sever. Add in some RDF as metadata and parse that into a Virtuoso server I'm running anyway for Nepomuk and this would essentially meet all your requirements. Unfortunately I haven't learned XSLT yet and haven't yet found something that does exactly this which is a bit surprising given how useful and potentially powerful such a scheme could be.

  3. Dieter_be says:

    +1

    a cross-browser - decent - sync solution would already be a nice solution.
    there are some browsers that try to make stuff like a this less painful. like uzbl or luakit.

  4. Debbie Graham says:

    Yes Yes Yes ...you have clearly been looking at my bookmarks. It would be nice if the websites could be pretagged and then were keyword searchable....(like subject headings in MARC catalogs) ...or sumpin'!
    thanks

  5. [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by GameCouch and Dazed (save ends), John Miedema. John Miedema said: Everything That is Wrong with Bookmarks http://www.matusiak.eu/numerodix/blog/index.php/2011/02/15/everything-that-is-wrong-with-bookmarks/ [...]

  6. Steve Thomas says:

    I gave up on Bookmarks a long time ago, except for the toolbar. Now, my essentials go into the toolbar, and anything else gets added to Diigo.com, with tags. That not only benefits me, but helps others who are also looking for something.

    Google does make many bookmarks obsolete, but there are things that took me some effort to find even through Google, so saving them in Diigo for later is worth the effort.

  7. darcy says:

    I'm surprised this article didn't discuss social bookmarking site like Diigo, Zotero and Delicious (which was in the news recently when Yahoo threatened to shut it down: see article: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=145320).

    A lot of the problems with bookmarks still remain in Delicious and Diigo (overly long or cute page names, a long list that must be organized) but some of the problems you've discussed are solved by social bookmarking: Delicious, Zotero and Diigo live in your browser, let you bookmark websites with one click of a mouse, and allow you to tag items and search for them without scrolling down a long list. As Steve Thomas & Akku pointed out, many people simply google a site rather than bookmark it because it's quicker to do a search than look through a list. Diigo and Delicious allow you to search within your bookmarks. Diigo has a link checker to help you find sites that are dead.

    The best part: these bookmarking sites live on the web and aren't tied to just one browser or computer.

    While these programs aren't perfect (Diigo has too many features and a bloated toolbar; Delicious relies too heavily on tags and tag bundles) they do solve some of the major bookmark problems...and they've been around for a while. Delicious started in 2005.

  8. darcy says:

    Sorry for the bum link. Here's a better one: http://mashable.com/2011/02/17/google-delicious-importer/

  9. numerodix says:

    I didn't mention them, because I've never really used them. I tried Delicious a bunch of years ago and I didn't really like it.

  10. Aaron Tay says:

    The "Awesome bar" feature in Firefox and presumably similar function in Chrome, helps surface bookmarks slightly better, as it will show matches from bookmarks.

    Otherwise totally agree.

  11. numerodix says:

    Yeah, the awesome bar is a real improvement. It is actually the bookmark search feature realized, come to think of it.