Google Blackball & Google Bookmarks
I’d love to see Google implement this feature. The ability to blackball my search results. It seems I often search the web for similar stuff. For instance, if I’m in the middle of learning some new programming language, I might search for help on it. Inevitably, there are a handful of very useful sites and a handful of completely useless sites which are only a waste of time. I wish I could just blacklist those useless sites so that I never have to deal with them again and white-list those sites which are most useful to me. I’d want this feature to be customized to me so it could be a local javascript cookie feature. Whether or not Google decides to use people’s blacklist / white-list ratings to further rank sites is completely up to them. As they say, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
I’m really disappointed with Google’s bookmarking feature. Their bookmarking web service is just a run of the mill traditional browser implementation. To me the biggest headache with bookmarks is the extremely archaic filing system which we’re forced to use. With most browsers and with Google’s bookmark feature, we’re limited to creating labelled directories to store our bookmarks in. So I find myself creating these rather broad categories such as ‘news’, ‘blogs’, ’shopping’, ‘banking’, ‘AJAX’. What I’d much rather see is the ability to add multiple tags to each bookmark and the ability to browse my bookmarks by means of multiple keywords. So I could for instance filter my bookmark browsing with ‘Photo’, ‘Blogs’, ‘Updated this week’. Furthermore, why not begin by pulling keywords from the website itself? Instead of requiring the person bookmarking the site to start from scratch, let the web author offer a handful of keywords or else use the original search words used to locate the site in the first place. In addition, then let me add my own keywords to the bookmark if I feel the need or add a rating just like I can to my MP3 songs. I’m sure you get the idea. How hard could this be to create Google? Well, who knows, perhaps the next version of Safari will work this way. While you’re at it, let’s make it easy to search sites based not just on their tags, but also on how recent they’ve posted, how big they are, and how popular they are (or unpopular). Furthermore, throw in a recommendation engine so that when I go to bookmark a given site, it shows me a list of similar sites others have bookmarked but which haven’t necessarily popped up in my current search results.
I was reading your post and the frustration with bookmarking.
I would like you to take a look at a Rich Interface implementation of Google BlogSearch at http://www.blogOMine.com
I would like to know what you think of the bookmarking feature implemented in this application.
Please note that this is still a work-in-progress.
One of the features that I am working on is exporting the bookmarks to a standard file that can then be imported into your browsers’ bookmarks.
Regards
Sree
Hi Sree,
Very nice blog search application with bookmarking! I really like how it’s sp easy to use. It’s also nice and fast. I really like your date range filter. This alone would make me want to use your tool over having to resort to trying to find a post using a blog’s archives which are painful.
Some things that would be nice to add (of course these are just some initial reactions which may or may not be feasible etc.)
Instead of having to choose between filtering by blog, author, or date range, it’d be nice to be able to filter by all three of the filters at the same time, for instance choosing just one or two blogs, one or two authors and a date range at the same time. By the way, I really like that you can already choose multiples in your filters.
It’d be nice to be able to have a filter by category which would pull the categories from the selected blogs.
I was able to type in multiple keywords into the search field which seemed to work ok. Â However, it’d be nice to have a filter by keyword(s). Perhaps the list could be prepopulated by the tag words from the blogs. Otherwise, just let the user add multiple keywords into the filter which they could use to browse the posts.
Once you’ve created a long list of bookmarks, it’d be nice to be able to browse the bookmarks by filtering them the same way you do to find blogs.
And last, I was sad to see all my bookmarks dissappear after I went away and came back, I was hoping they’d have been saved as a cookie or in a database on the server. Perhaps a future version? Of course if you make this into such a service, it’d be nice to be able to make some of my bookmarks public for sharing and some private for myself. You’d then be competing with services such as del.icio.us
Most excellent start. I’ll be sure to come back to see how you’re progressing.