I had a conversation with Mike recently about del.icio.us. Specifically, Mike asked if I ever use my bookmarks as reference. My short answer was "yes".
I've long been a fan of del.icio.us. At last count, I had 507 bookmarks in there dating back to 2004. I've religiously tagged my items to help me find them and I've definitely found that I use my del.icio.us as a reference as I learn Ruby on Rails. However, there's still something missing.
The something is this: I need to categorize my bookmarks perfectly in order to be able to use them in the future. If I bookmark something today I need to tag it with all of the information that I might need in order to search for it in the future.
As an example, I typically tag my Ruby on Rails bookmarks with both Ruby and Rails rather than RubyOnRails. I do this because I might start coding a lot of Ruby in the future without the Rails framework. At that point, Ruby is a better keyword for my searches than RubyOnRails would be.
What would really help here is the ability to tag my data but not necessarily rely on it as my search data. After all, I've already bookmarked the URL - why not search through the content of the page rather than just the limited data that I tag for each bookmark?
That led me along one of those many paths on the Internet that end at Google. Google Bookmarks to be exact. As a devoted user of GMail, Google Reader, Google Sync, Google Calendar, Picasa and YouTube, I'm comfortable with selling a bit of my soul to Google. But I sell my soul with an expectation that a Google product kicks the butt of its competitors.
Google Bookmarks didn't inspire me with that when I first used it. The UI is even more sparse that del.icio.us. I'm not entirely sure how to use it. There doesn't seem to be much support for a snazzy FireFox extension. But it's got the one kick-ass feature that I want - it exposes the content of every URL that I bookmark to the full power of a Google Search. That is a killer feature that I had to try.
Using the service at persistent.info, I migrated my del.icio.us bookmarks into Google Bookmarks and got started with a test. That test was to see if I could find a subset of my bookmarks that had both Rails content and ASP.Net content.
Del.icio.us has a feature where you can click on a tag and then see a list of related tags. Unfortunately, checking out my del.icio.us tags for Rails didn't turn up any related tags of ASP.Net (obviously I've never tagged a bookmark with both ASP.Net and Rails). Since relying on my tagging was useless, I turned to the del.icio.us search.
Doing a del.icio.us search for "Rails ASP.Net" on my bookmarks gives me 0 hits. That's to be expected I guess. The del.icio.us search only scans your titles, notes and tags. But it also gives you the option to search all of del.icio.us rather than just your bookmarks. Doing that gave me 298 hits. While that's certainly better than zero, it's a pretty big number to go through.
This is where the cool factor of Google kicks in. After I finished migrating my del.icio.us bookmarks into Google, I tried the Google Bookmark Search for "rails asp.net". I immediately got 6 hits. None of these hits had both Rails and ASP.Net in the title. In fact, 3 of them had neither of those terms in the title. So how did it find them? Easy - full content search of the bookmarked URL. I could have tagged these bookmarks with anything and it still would found them.
Google Bookmarks is clunky, ugly and a little bit painful. But by searching all of the content instead of relying on me to future-proof my tags, it saves me time and makes my bookmarks more useful. It's also going to change the way that I bookmark. From now, I will bookmark far more often. In the past, I would only bookmark those pages that were REALLY good because I didn't want to create a clutter that would be difficult to search. Now I can embrace clutter and rely on Google to organize it for me. I like that.