Do we need bookmarks?

Do we need to bookmark web sites anymore? Can Google do the job?

With Firefox 3, you can just type a keyword into the address bar and it'll usually take you to the Google “I'm Feeling Lucky” first choice. Most of the time it seems to work, though in some cases (I guess where it's not sure it's what you really want, the first result isn't dominating the rankings) it takes you to the Google search results instead.

I tried a few. These all went straight to the place I was thinking of.

Age — www.theage.com.au
SMH — www.smh.com.au
NYT — www.nytimes.com
Connex — www.connexmelbourne.com.au
Wikipedia — www.wikipedia.org
Metlink — www.metlinkmelbourne.com.au
toxic custard — www.toxiccustard.com
apple — www.apple.com
herald sun — www.news.com.au/heraldsun
bbc news — news.bbc.co.uk
twitter — twitter.com/home

Even, to my surprise, “drive” got me to www.drive.com.au… I suppose me bringhow make money youtubeel> being in Australia ensures I get an AU-skewed result. Or maybe drive.com.au really does dominate that search term.

The only one that landed off the mark was TPN. I wanted The Podcast Network, but it took me to the Wikipedia entry for Total parenteral nutrition.

Searching for my name, and some others terms (eg cameron reilly, geekrant), took me to the Google search results instead.

Some don't work at all. Don't try searching for localhost, for instance! (Not that you'd normally need to.)

And we'll always need bookmarks for private pages, and shortcuts to pages away from the beaten homepage track.

[I think Cameron Reilly wrote on this topic a couple of years ago. Perhaps ironically given the subject, I can't find that posting.]

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4 thoughts on “Do we need bookmarks?”

  1. glen

    I don’t tend to use book marks any more. The sites I check *extremely* regularly, I tend to set as one of the home page tabs.

    All other links, I use del.icio.us. It’s like favorites except with tagging.

  2. Weltallica

    I keep all my bookmarks in a folder, than use the OPEN ALL IN TABS option. Read, close, read, close, etc. Before work and after.

    Plus Bookmarks are good for those who prefer the mouse over the keyboard. Sometimes you just want to recline and let one hand do it all (laaaaazy). This is also why I rarely use any of the numerous nifty Vista enhancements. They’re mainly for kwyboard users.

  3. Glenn (with two n's!)

    Daniel, I’m guessing it is skewed to the geographic area assigned to your IP. I searched for drive, and it found “Drive (TV Series)” on Wikipedia. I also use the Google toolbar for my bookmarks, and the FF3 search box shows suggestions from them first (while typing), above history and suggestions. Very cool, although I hadn’t noticed the very faint grey text (bookmarks/history/suggestions) and was being very amazed at FF/Google’s ability to find the exact page I wanted with just one or two words (since I was trying to get back to a page already viewed/bookmarked).

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