Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by munmaek 2339 days ago
Except with google it’s becoming impossible to find links from several years ago. Unless I remember exactly the right keywords and maybe the website name...

How is this FOMO? The entire point of bookmarks is “maybe I’ll come back later to this”. Bookmarks let you save content that you come across that may not be relevant at this time, but could be useful later. There is no penalty for saving pages because space is virtually unlimited, and we can only collect so many bookmarks anyway. Searching through bookmarks isn’t a difficult task, and it’s way better than relying on google.

3 comments

> The entire point of bookmarks is “maybe I’ll come back later to this”

I think for me there is so much information coming at me every day, that I rarely have time to go back to something later. I bookmark a select number of sites for projects/interests I am working on but I couldn't deal with having ~5k worth of bookmarks in my backlog. I just don't have time for managing/triaging/reviewing that.

My comment about FOMO addresses the fear of 'what if I can't find this stuff again'. It's more akin to a hoarding mentality, I suppose. How many people's garages are full of junk they 'think they might come back to later'. It's something I actively eschew because if I allow that thought process to enter into my life I'll be hindered by the activity, and the ability to let go is important to my happiness and wellbeing. I literally can't sleep at night if I think that I might missed out on archiving something I might need. I find it enlightening to treat the world as ephemeral.

I freely admit different people work/think/live in different ways and perhaps my original comment was a little flippant.

Google (and related services, such as youtube) allows you to use before:YYYY-MM-DD and after:YYYY-MM-DD to only show results that were created before or after a certain date.
I think you're missing the wood for the trees a bit there. The point is that there's so much on Google now - and a lot of it is effectively just crap data like pinterest posts - that it becomes increasingly impossible to find specific needles in that haystack. If I know at some point in the last 10 years I've read an article online that could have been written any point in the last 30 years, before and after dates don't really help.
Pintrest seems to inappropriately float to the top of way to many searches.
You're suggesting spending a lot of time and hassle trying to wrestle with search engines instead of just keeping a bookmark that can be found and accessed very quickly?
2600 has an essay, "The Mysteries of the Hidden Internet", on this phenomenon in their autumn 2019 quarterly. It was quite a fun read! Check it out at Barnes and Noble. Or buy a copy (https://store.2600.com/products/autumn-2019).