Google Bookmarks
Google launched it’s bookmarking service quite some time ago. Until now it didn’t seem very interesting to me since I liked del.icio.us a lot.
I tried to use it several times but always came back to del.icio.us, either because of it’s tagging capabilities or some other feature. Yet the full-text search of Google’s Bookmarks is a killer feature!
Times change, now I made the switch to Google Bookmarks (for good).
Rationale
Google offers full-text search, labels and RSS feeds for search queries. Del.icio.us offers search within tags and description, tags and RSS feeds for almost all pages. Google keeps all bookmarks private (unless you give away one of your RSS feeds), del.icio.us is usually public but you can mark certain links private.
| — | Del.icio.us | |
| Organization | Labels | Tags |
| Search | Full-text | Tag and description |
| RSS | For searches | Any page |
| Access | Private | Public and private |
| Status | Unknown | Hyped |
The full-text search is the reason why I make the switch. I’ll miss the tags I guess, but I do like labels too. I always limited myself to at most four tags in del.icio.us, so the label approach of Google makes sense to me.
The difference between labels and tags as I see it
Labels aren’t meant as metadata for the sites, but for a personal categorization, tags are referred to as metadata for the content. So why should I use tags if I can search the full text?
Setup
I once wrote my own clunky script to import all my bookmarks from del.icio.us to Google. Recently one of Google’s developers wrote a much nicer script to do the same task.
The thing with Mihai’s script is, it takes all tags as labels within Google’s Bookmarks which isn’t very comfortable. My script throws all links in a single label called “delicious”.
I don’t think my script is ever going public so it may be best to customize Mihai’s script if you’d like to have a similar behavior.
Smart keywords and quick-search
This makes the whole thing really cool. You can easily assign a smart keyword to search your bookmarks:
Add a new bookmark with http://www.google.com/bookmarks/find?q=%s as URL assign a keyword, for example b and you’re done.
Now you can type b blog.interlinked.org in your address-field and Firefox searches for “blog.interlinked.org” within your bookmarks.
Look here for more information on smart keywords
Firefox Plugins
There are two plugins for Firefox I’d like to mention:
GMarks displays the bookmarks in a sidebar with their labels as folders. It also adds a “star” to the toolbar which shows if the current URL is already bookmarked.
gBrain adds all sites you visit to your bookmarks. At first this doesn’t sound very good, but imagine: you can search through all sites you ever visited.
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It’s bug free like the Amazon rain forrest is bug free. —Comment at Digg about Firefox
