Ask HN: How many bookmarks do you have?

19 points by raleighm ↗ HN
And what do you do (or plan to do) with them?

20 comments

[ 686 ms ] story [ 2526 ms ] thread
I had ~3300 bookmarks and just decided to bulk delete half of them that lived in random folders. Now i'm at 1400. Most of them are CS/tech/coding related. When I save a link I make myself believe its something important that I'll find useful in the future. The truth is I don't even know what is in my bookmarks anymore and I hardly ever go back to manually check what javascript article I bookmarked one year ago. Nowadays, I just use firefox awesome bar that, by default, searches through my bookmarks when I type something to search for. I also find tags much better at organizing bookmarks than folders and I'm happy firefox supports this feature.
I've got >9k bookmarks, over half of them related to programming, collected over about 9 years.

At that scale, recall is indeed a problem, and one I've been planning a solution to for quite some time now. Think custom search engine with automated topic detection and tagging.

Twenty, all in a single menu (I have set up no submenus), and all with a single word name in order that I can easily type it to use with a shell script that I use to launch the browser with loading a bookmark (the shell script uses SQLite to make a list of bookmarks if no name is given, as well as using SQLite to find the URL of the bookmark if the name is given). Occasionally I delete some, and occasionally I add some. I don't use the bookmark toolbar.
2000+ bookmarks.

If I need a specific bookmark, I press Shift + B in the browser and search for "linux SSH install" to get that particular page.

The reason I get that page is; I made a hashtag when I saved it as my bookmark. I try to come up with tags to find them back in seconds.

The reason I don't use FireFox tags itself is that if I imported the bookmarks into Chrome I lose the tags. And with my "solution" I don't lose them.

On Pinboard.in I have 12983 bookmarks.

Many of them are recipes. Some are items on my wishlist. Lots of them are news articles, some essays. Lots of them are guides/tutorials howtos for Bash, Python, Linux, networking etc.

The recipes I use from time to time.

The IT-related ones I consult from time to time whenever I need them.

And since Pinboard allows for fulltext search it's quite easy to find stuff when I need it.

[Edit: One can also pay extra to enable archiving, so when articles are removed from the WWW one can still access them via Pinboard.]

after covid lockddown 8. I finally got to clean up my bookmarks.
I had about 2k before clean up.

Cleaning up here is what i realized. 1. i am a full stack developer and i learned that any technical documentation i bookmark is mostly the first link on my google search. 2. while cleaning up most of the bookmarks were 404's lol. 3. i have a professional browser and a hobby browser. This helps me focus better and differentiate between bing watching youtube/9gag/ vs work stuff. 4. i saved forums links about a lot of stuff that i won't be opening in ages. It is like a Compulsive hoarding behavior.

Keeping things clean organized helps guys, do give it a try.

Thousands. Unfortunately saving a bookmark has the same effect as entering a black hole for me. Potentially useful info I never resurface just because I tend to re-google instead of remembering it's there.

For the same reason I tend to leave tabs open so they stick a little more. But I have too many tabs open so I know that my model utterly broken.

Please help.

That makes 2 of us. What have you tried to solve it?
Just stop. You said it yourself, just re-google. Live goes on without bookmarks.
Most likely between 100 to 200 bookmarks. The majority of these bookmarks are sorted and placed in folders. It is just useful links for me - I do revisit them
thousands, probably 20k plus. But recently archived and I don't mind because I never looked at them.
I've got close to 3000 bookmarks.

Almost all of them are saved as full text + PDF in my email (Gmail) inbox under separate labels like 'JS', 'Design', 'SEO' etc.

Gmail's search is pretty decent so it helps me find stuff that I am looking for quickly.

417, managing them with my own tool [1]. It's a collection of links with a high probability of (re)visiting, structured in a folder-like pattern. For all articles, online courses, and other actionable items, I use Pocket/Todoist instead. And around ~10 browser bookmarks for things I'm using daily.

[1] https://darekkay.com/static-marks/

Zero. If I can’t remember it well enough to google it, I don’t need to see it again.
less than 50, categorized in 5 folders as below:

1) google.com 2) office (all internal links like jira, wiki, stash, etc) 3) daily-read (hacker news, slashdot, etc. ) 4) archive (the links which I like and refer as notes when needed) 5) to-read (some links which I found interesting to read but don't have time to read immediately)

5008 on Pinboard, many thousands more in Instapaper.

I either find a use for them at some point, or I don't. Doesn't bother me if I don't as I'm not trying to process everything I come across, just putting them in a trusted system where I could find them again if I needed to.

I do find it useful if I have a personal research project in an area of interest to start searching with what I already have vs. going to Google. Most of the links I have are vetted either by me or a source I trust so they don't have a bias to who has good on page SEO.

I use the LastPass extension. Here I write down everything that is important to me.