Yesterday, I deleted all of my bookmarks.
Alright, I did leave the ones on my toolbar, the ones I click every morning, noon and night. But other than that, they're all gone!
There were some real gems in my bookmarks. I don't bookmark lightly you see, so when I do, it's because the site really has something unique to offer. The problem was that I've been bookmarking for so long, and they were all such quality that I had a hard time finding things anyway!
Because of this, I'd even bookmarked some sites multiple times...
I've had this bookmark overload problem in the past, so I've tried other things. A myriad of social bookmarking sites, carefully categorized link lists, named files containing related links that get deleted when they've served their purpose. I've even had a link submitter on my site that I used for some time.
These were all ineffective solutions. A far cry from the elegant, mess free system I was looking for. Was looking for? That's right, I've found a solution.
Earlier this morning I needed something from one of the sites I'd previously bookmarked. I actually thought twice about removing this particular bookmark because I knew I'd need this site again, I just didn't know when, and I certainly didn't expect it to be so soon.
I thought for a little while about how I could get back there. It wasn't in my history, I couldn't remember the name of the site, but what I did know was why I needed it.
I did a quick Google search. I found the site I wanted. First search, first result. Thank you Google.
Yes, I'm concerned about Google's world domination. No, not all links will be so quick to find. But thanks to their slowly improving ranking algorithms I'll probably find more relevant, recent and useful results doing a Google search than I would have done by simply visiting the sites in my bookmarks.
On top of this benefit, I feel so clean now. Never again will thousands of poorly categorized bookmarks come tumbling down from the Safari bookmarks menu every time I need a site I probably wouldn't have found anyway.