[nosignal]

Am I the only one who doesn't use bookmarks?

99% of the time, if I need to find something I've read before, I'll just search for it & find it.

The exception to this is when I was working support and had several product spec sheets & other reference pages bookmarked for quick access to email links to customers. Even while I was at Uni, I'd download articles to PDF.

On the rare occasion that I like or am interested in something enough to want to bookmark it, I find I rarely actually come back to it. Just looking now, in my Bookmarks menu I have a couple of folders — apparently the result of me saying "save all open tabs as bookmarks" in the hope of coming back to it later — but never having done so.

Long-form articles I come across while I should be doing something else go to Instapaper to be read later (is this what people use bookmarks for?). Even then realistically I only actually read 20% of them.

Anything I really think a friend of mine should read, I email a link there & then. This is a 1- or 2- click operation.

Anything that I think is just too interesting/funny/important to keep to one or two friends, I put on Twitter, or here on HN. (I guess that ends up being a kind of bookmark service; I have scoured my submitted stories (and upvoted stories) to find them again.)

For my frequently visited sites without RSS, the browser URL bar is my friend - just start typing & it autocompletes. The only bookmark in my bookmark bar is the "Instapaper: Read Later" bookmarklet.

What does everyone else use bookmarks for? Is there some awesome use case I've been ignorant to since 1996? Am I just a freak for never wanting to revisit things?

[nathan_long]

I use Pinboard.in a lot. I do not use it for "frequently visited sites"; I can type the URL faster than clicking, especially with autocompletion.

For me, bookmarks are mainly for 1) things I may want again and only vaguely remember 2) articles I'd like to read when I have time.

Examples of stuff I've recently pinned:

- An article that has a quote from Linus Torvalds that I'd like to use in a blog post I may write someday - The best Inkscape tutorial I found in maybe 10 minutes of searching - An HN article comparing A/B testing with multi-armed bandit, which is irrelevant to me right now but maybe someday I'll want to read

In each case, I pin that thing, give it whatever tags make sense to me, and possibly write a quick description.

There are 51,200,000 search results in Google for "Linus." In my personal pinboard, there are 2. Guess which I'm going to try first if I vaguely remember something I once saw about him?

Probably 80% of my bookmarks are never used, which is another reason why the "tag now, search later" approach is so nice to me; those neglected ones aren't cluttering up a GUI, making it hard for me to find what I want right now; searching cuts right to what I want.

Pinboard.in is fast, simple, super-effective, cheap (but not free, so I'm the customer), and cross-browser (since it's a bookmarklet).

It also lets you mark everything private by default, which I like. Too many things are social these days. I don't want to broadcast my opinions about sites; I just want to find things again later.

It's one of my favorite tools.

[gdilla]

Dittpo. Pinboard.in rocks. It's like what bookmarks should be - cloud based, taggable, and easily searchable. Also it allows you to just shove URLs into a read later category. I do find myself going back to it - something will come up at work and I'll remember, oh i read something about that approach that was very insightful, and just quickly grab it to share with others or refresh my memory.

[Dn_Ab]

Am I the only one who doesn't use bookmarks?

No. I do, but there are a lot of people with different approaches, so all that can be said is the number who bookmark is large and the number who don't is also large.

What does everyone else use bookmarks for?

Presumably to save effort and as a form of external memory. In my case, I bookmark with probability proportional to how difficult it was to find. In particular, I only ever bookmark knowledge and information and do not use bookmarks as a storage for trinkets (alas the things which interest me are likely dull graphite to most). Also, I have not done any tests but it appears google searches are non stationary - old search terms do not always return the same results. Finally, for me, it is a very frustrating experience when I am looking for something I know is there.

Is there some awesome use case I've been ignorant to since 1996?

Yes, but the answers are subjective and incommensurable with the ranking criteria of those who would ask a question like that.

Am I just a freak for never wanting to revisit things?

No. The word freak is only part of the used vocabulary of those severely lacking imagination (to clarify, this is not targeted at you but those in habit of calling people freaks).

[biot]

On more than one occasion I've run across developer documentation with a specific class buried somewhere that wasn't easily searchable using Google. Typically these have been those multiframe one-class-per-page javadoc style API references. It's quite helpful to bookmark the root frame and have it available at a click... great for exploring a new API when you may not want a specific search.