Comment by econ
7 hours ago
The Mosaic browser (1993) had full text history search.
We then got a bookmark system that was every bit as terrible as a web directory.
It stayed that way. The delicious search revenue made organizing websites uninteresting. That obscure website you enjoyed a decade ago but don't even remember, they had lots of traffic like you. No point updating or keeping it online. You can't have rss in Firefox but here is a Facebook like button in your address bar in stead.
I've tried to maintain the bookmark menu but I rarely use it since everything is dead. Why aren't browsers storing a text version of the bookmark? Did people in 1993 have more resources than us? Should I be afraid it grows to a few GB over the decades?
A good few dead websites have a backup some place but there is no automation to find it. If you had a string of text from a page you might be able to search for it. If the page found is highly similar we might automate the process to have alternative location for bookmarks with a nice warning dialog.
Bookmarks died because most humans are allergic to having to do bookkeeping and cleanup tasks that are incidental to what they really want to do.
We see that over and over again, in a bunch of non-tech fields. My kids never want to clean up their toys; they will pull out new ones, but it is a struggle to get them into the habit of putting the old ones away first. My parents used to keep a notebook with every gas fill-up they made; nobody born after about 1990 does that anymore. We were taught how to balance a checkbook in elementary school; basically nobody does that anymore, we put everything on autopay and if you are diligent you check a statement or import it into Quicken once a month (most people don't even do that, they have no idea what they are spending and predictably, usually no money left over). GMail succeeded because instead of putting your mail in folders, you just leave it in one lump with Google and rely on full-text search. A lot of Zoomer computer users don't even know what files and folders are, they just use apps, which take them straight to what they want to do and don't offer things like possession of your own data.
Back in the (~early 2010s) days when Google still allowed internal innovation, there were recurrent demos produced by engineers of full-text search over your web history, though of course it was your web history as stored by Google and none of this was local. It never became a product, largely because users are too lazy to go to a separate search product just for your history, or because they're too lazy to check a separate box saying "Search my history". Instead I think web history became a ranking input to general search and it would mix in results that you frequently visited to the general results, which honestly I think was a more useful approach.
That and google had a major interest in killing bookmarks. Bookmarks were actively competing with google search traffic, so they put in a lot of effort to get you to stop using them. Why bookmark something when you can just search for it.
Eh, it's true that Google's incentives aren't really aligned with bookmarking tools, but the magnitude of the effect is much less than you're thinking of. Basically 100% of Google's revenues come from commercial-seeking queries, cases where the user has a purchasing intent before they came to the search engine. All of the non-commercial uses - coding, random facts, research, education, navigational queries, etc - are just loss-leaders so that your fingers automatically reach for Google when you're searching for lawyers, contractors, home-improvement fixtures, apps, furniture, flowers, restaurants, consumer electronics, etc. Google (of the 2010s certainly, but also true now) considered Amazon to be its primary competition, not Yahoo or del.icio.us.
They put precisely zero effort into killing bookmarks. I know because I was there, and probably would've been tasked with doing it. Well, that and because bookmarks still exist and I can still use them. They also put zero effort into improving bookmarks or making them easier for you to use, but it's death by inaction and consumer choice, not by anything Google did.
2 replies →
Why should kids put away their toys first?
Isn’t it more optimal, from the perspective of play, to have them spread out?
I can see the argument that if you clear your desk, you’ll be more inclined to draw because you have the space. But if I didn’t impose that value, they wouldn’t necessarily draw. They’d just play with something else.
I don’t track my fuel usage. I did once. Economically, I don’t need to. The car tells me my MPG anyway, literally, if I care to look.
Accounts are harder to track now, with fewer physical assets and more renting and subscriptions.
The point you make seems to be that rigidity in the system would bring value. But I think the values people have often exist outside the system. The system is imposing an idea of what is worth tracking or organising in the first place.
Oddly, I think LLMs are quite intentional in their current incarnation. You start with an empty input box, state a curiosity, and go looking for information. There’s very little imposed structure around what you should care about.
That changes once OpenAI et al. start tracking what you do and recommending what you should be looking at before you’ve even formed the intention yourself.
> My kids never want to clean up their toys; they will pull out new ones, but it is a struggle to get them into the habit of putting the old ones away first.
Yes, as kids probably always did since the invention of the children's room. The usual solution was to educate - and push - them until they hopefully started to understand the benefits that an orderly room can give you and maybe even had some fun thinking of a good ordering scheme by themselves.
Only in tech would the response to kids being too lazy to clean up their rooms be "oh well obviously keeping your stuff in order is an unworkable strategy".
I remember that, back when we were in school, we would actually spend a lot of time structuring the bookmark folder, making elaborate menu hierarchies. Doing this the first time was fun.
The problem was, this lasted about until the first time the PC had to be reinstalled or someone switched the browser or something else caused the bookmarks menu to be lost. Redoing all that stuff after it got wiped was much more of a chore than doing it initially.
But this would be my takeaway here: If software developers want their users to manage their own ordering schemes or use customization features, make it easy and convenient to do - and for the love of everything, threat the resulting bookmark trees, settings files etc as critical data that has to be synced, backed-up etc. If it has to be redone after a few updates or a crash, then no one will use it.
(Incidentally, tech companies have absolutely no problem "educating" their users if the behavior is something they care about. I'm pretty sure, no product or marketing person ever said "oh well, it sure would be nice if all our users made accounts or installed our app, but they're far too lazy for that, so that's a nonstarter...")
>If software developers want their users to manage their own ordering schemes or use customization features, make it easy and convenient to do
This is akin to telling parents that if they want to their children to clean their rooms, you should make it easy and convenient to do. Obviously this is non-sensical: if you make a mess it might be hard and inconvenient work. Thats why kids don't do it!
I find some tech criticisms to be simply inane; the tech companies are not going to absorb the costs of educating users or fixing unworkable strategies. Not because Bezos needs to buy another yacht, but because the companies that try to do that all die before they get big. There is a giant graveyard of startups who have tried to be the "responsible and patient parent", and they have all died. Users don't want to put up with it, and if given the option will run to the company that just handles everything for them with a subscription fee or reselling their data.
1 reply →
i had invested a lot into del.icio.us and other similar systems but what really killed bookmarks for me was the instability of URIs and how hard it was to search for the right page based on a title or bookmark name and not the contents. At the time, google was really really effective at search.
As an alternative to Gmail can I recommend Hotmail? I recently created an account and a nice feature is that all new email goes into the Junk folder by default. It was obviously designed by a misanthropic hermit, but the benefit is that your emails drop to almost zero. It's a bit of a bummer if you had a job opportunity or a friend tries to contact you, but on the other hand, fewer distractions.
Crazy times.
Was I actually the only kid who liked cleaning up toys and sorting Knex and Lego and stuff?
No, I was the kid over there playing librarian and sorting all my books and games by author and year. Legos and Knex were also prime sorting targets, but the real joy came from getting random jars of buttons or beads. Getting one of those shelves with 100 tiny drawers was like a recipe for heaven.
I use Innoreader as a database of websites/blogposts I want to reference or read again later.
I only use it to bookmark it into the database so I can search it up later.
Firefox had a tool partnership with an app that did exactly this, but unfortunately it was put in the grave last year (now I know why).
I'm curious about the history - what would you use a list of gas fill ups for? Price tracking?
I gave up on my book because after a couple decades I didn't have a good answer. Sure I could brag about the one full-up where I got 57mpg, and I knew about the one where it was only 36 - who cares.
Back in the 1930s the book was probably useful because changes in mpg were a sign you needed to do a tuneup early. But back then everybody knew a tuneup was every few months and once in a while something went off in between. Cars are a lot more reliable.
To figure out MPG you were getting.
3 replies →
1. To monitor gas mileage primarily. Any sudden decline in gasoline mileage can warn of impending engine component failure. [I haven't experienced it but I suppose it could also warn of a repair error, e.g., if you failed to put a new air filter cartridge in to replace the old one (a major oversight but nonetheless possible) then it is likely that your mileage would go up suddenly. One would have to question whether the better mileage was b/c, say, you just switched to Shell gasoline or instead did something wrong when you recently changed the air filter?!]
2. keeping receipts ensures that if there is a problem and your engine is damaged, then you can show where you bought the fuel, oil or component and get recompense. This is rare but does happen and it can be a costly repair. Examples are:
- bad gasoline - usually debris or water. Can stop fuel flow and cost you replacement of a gas filter at the least.
- incorrect oil change - you pay for an oil change but they don't put on a new oil filter or they add the wrong kind of oil or they add too little oil or they add too much oil. Don't discount the last one: too much oil can damage some engines seriously. I once had a dealer change my car's oil. Prior to service I explicitly warned the mechanic that the engine was a rare model and required less oil than most. Nonetheless he overfilled it. Luckily I spotted the difference immediately b/c the engine ran like shite right out of the garage. I made a freeway U-turn,drove back in, re-explained the car's needs and insisted they drain off the overfill and let me check it. The mechanic tried to cover his ass by treating it as another "crazy customer" but I just told his companions that a) he'd fucked up and b) I had specifically warned him about the problem earlier so c) they'd better keep an eye on him - he wasn't as good as they were.
3. If you sell a car, buyers love getting the records proving that you bought good oil/gas, performed maintenance, etc. FWIW most buyers do not continue to maintain such records in my experience.
I don't maintain a log book and I know only one person who does. But I file receipts for gas, parts, fluids, filters and major maintenance for each vehicle.
It might appear that all this is good reason to buy an EV but you've got the same problems as do ICUs. Suppose you pull into a facility in Kansas for a recharge as a thunderstorm rolls in. While you're eating lunch the facility is struck by lightning and the transient currents fry one or more parts on you EV. The recharge station is unlikely to be willing to pay your repairs unless you have proof you were there during a malfunction.
1 reply →
It all went wrong when writing was introduced, the lazy kids became addicted to letting the technology take place of their natural human memory.
W3C's Amaya browser [1] was as much an editor as it was a browser. Production and consumption were supposed to be symmetrical. This was the promise of the web.
Instead we turned it into a worse version of television, where you still only consume passively what is fed to you while being watched and analysed.
[1] https://dev.w3.org/Amaya/amaya/AmayaPage.html
I just discovered https://hister.org/ (I think from a link here on hacker news) ... it solves the full text history search really really well.
It's really great, just about perfect for my needs.
Related : Hister https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49743097
I have this with websites I read a few months ago, stuff from 1993 that is still alive is pure luck at this point. Nothing more frustrating than wanting to share a link with a colleague that you have seen recently and remember a couple of cribs from but that doesn't stand out enough in the history to ring a bell.
I am pretty sure early versions of the Safari browser (in the 2000s) did in fact store a full-text version of every webpage in the history and allow you to search that. I even remember looking at the plist files where Safari stored all the extracted text.
I relied on that a lot until one day a random system update deleted all my old browsing history.
But today you can just say: "Agent, please record all my page visits. Store the page texts in a file. When I do a search, ... etc."
Do you guys know if there is an extension that textifies most of the internet?
There's a lot of reader-mode extensions out there - I'm not sure which ones are good nowadays.
Your chain of thoughts is dangerous, because once you realize that can you can cache website content locally, you might also want to share this cache with your friends so that traffic is reduced ;)
It can be optional. The owner of the website should get to decide what people do with their stuff. They can provide a tracker and (as long as it is alive) chose if to burn its own bandwidth or point you at a seed. [Dynamic] ads can still be inserted and blocked as usual. Should be funny to make money from a website that you don't even host anymore. Default browsers can also respect legal take down orders if they are published on the website.
A whole different world from posts vanishing into the social media memory hole.
Then there was the endless attempts at the "semantic web"
I solved it with Obsidian Web Clipper
But what if they update the webpage to something completely different from what you bookmarked? Wouldn't you like to have access to the most up-to-date version always? /s
When `Cache-Control: max-age` expires a new copy should be fetched. Old version can be versioned by date.