I have been sticking with Delicious in the hope that Yahoo will sell it off to a good team, who can revive Delicious. Strange that no other company takes bookmarks seriously. Google Bookmarks is a joke - it doesn't even sync with Chrome.
I've been using a combination of Pinboard and XMarks. Overall extremely happy so far - Pinboard manages about a thousand and has tags and one-click "read later" and offline searching and is my primary backup, and XMarks keeps my dozen browsers and 500 bookmarks in sync transparently (stable + beta + dev + sometimes nightly versions of a number of browsers).
Google Search killed bookmarks, it's faster and easier to simply Google a vague string you remember from the page, rather than type a tag into a different service, or trawl through six hundred sites you have incoherently organised.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
True, but I use Delicious for grouping things that I don't remember, so it saves me not a one-off search but an entire search session on a topic. Also, the graph aspect of seeing who else bookmarked a page, then what else they've bookmarked and tagged, is still a killer feature (if it weren't so slow) after all these years. Given how rarely I'm the first to add any page, for me Delicious is basically a database of everything interesting on the web. That just has to be valuable. If only some deep thinkers and hard workers would do something with it.
Also, the Google Chrome bar is notably less useful for this. Chrome supplies completions assuming what you have typed is in the beginning of the URL, while Firefox searches within the URL, title, and so on.
My #1 use for bookmarks is to save particular page while researching a topic. I might do 20 searches with variations of terms, and find a useful page perhaps through a link on a page that came up in the search.
Then, a few days later when I need that page again, Google search is not going to help I'd have to recreate the exact query that led to me finding the site in question. That is why bookmarks are still useful.
Maybe because bookmarking is a bit like TODO apps: not technically difficult to do but everyone hates using someone else's system. Of course, Delicious was the exception :)
I use Chrome bookmarks and they sync to Google Docs... I'm not quite sure why they don't sync to Google Bookmarks. Nonetheless, I'm pleased with it as I'm on multiple systems and I still have my bookmarks built into my browser. Added bonus that when I start to "search" in the url/search bar, it brings up relevant bookmarks.
And they might just get my subscription once I use up my last 70 or so free bookmark slots. The two best features are that you get a good search function, and it caches the page for you in case the original one falls off the net.
