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January 10, 2000

Web Organizers:
Organize Your Web Chaos
New Web-organization tools can reduce the amount of time wasted in hunting for information online. But they don't go far enough to meet the needs of employees at most large companies.

By Gregory Smith

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he amount of time wasted searching the Internet is legendary. Both from watching the activities of employees and from personal experience, it's obvious that finding information on the Internet is too often an expensive chore.

There are several poorly coordinated technologies that help users retrieve information from the Internet. Search engines, of varying cleverness, and personal bookmarks are the two cornerstones of this effort. Web organizers aim to make organizing what you've found on the Internet smarter by making it practical to assemble huge volumes of bookmarks. Simply put, Web organizers aim to combine the retrievability of search engines with the known quality of your Internet history. As such, they can't help you locate something you've never encountered, but they do make it possible for you to reuse what you've found. Aside from saving time, you're more likely to synthesize something useful from the shards you've picked up along the way.

I recently tested two strategies to help organize Web histories. Backflip is a free online service that works something like a personalized Yahoo. While browsing the Internet, I was able to add links to useful pages to the My Backflip database; I could then search and categorize those links as I pleased. There's nothing to manage locally, except for adding a couple of buttons to Internet Explorer. Deploying it is a snap. SurfSaver, a more conventional offering from askSam Systems Inc., installs locally on each client and provides a similar searchable, hierarchical collection of links. Because it's client software, askSam adds offline browsing, which helps minimize useless bookmarks from site reorganization.

While both solutions succeed in saving time lost in the Internet wilderness, neither goes far enough in its current form. Indeed, large companies need a solution that exploits the overlapping needs of their employees. Some existing search engines already incorporate the popularity of particular pages in calculating search relevance. Meta-search engines geared toward large companies can calculate the popularity of pages as defined by your workforce, which creates a self-tuning enterprise-specific search tool. Combine this sort of system with the organizing tools that Backflip and SurfSaver provide, and I'd be three-quarters of the way to a truly powerful solution.

The missing piece is the inability of any of these products to create collaborative team folders, so co-workers can browse and comment on the bookmarks of others. Sadly, all of these technologies exist separately, but no one has successfully combined them into a single product or service.

Backflip
Backflip is a deceptively simple online service. At first glance, it's merely an online version of Internet bookmarks. But unlike conventional bookmarks, Backflip provides a variety of views of where you've been on the Web--grouped by topic, site, and recent addition--and includes a simple search mechanism that culls from all of your Backflip bookmarks.

Despite the added flexibility, Backflip doesn't impress me as a replacement for most conventional bookmarks. Indeed, a lot of my Internet shortcuts target information sources, and keeping these frequently accessed sites as local bookmarks is clearly faster than fetching them from Backflip. The real power in Backflip comes from filing links to pages that contain valuable information. By indexing these sites, you avoid losing track of material you're likely to reference again. Of course, accumulating links to every useful page on the Internet can quickly overwhelm the simplistic management tools inherent in Web browsers. However, Backflip's multiple views and search engine become more powerful as you feed them with more links.

As an online service, the product couldn't be simpler to set up. After registering, the online wizard shows you how to add a "Backflip It" link to your Internet Explorer toolbar and can automatically import your existing collection of Favorites. Toolbar aside, no client configuration is necessary. By default, Backflip categorizes your bookmarks using a hybrid of your existing Favorites folders and a Yahoo-like taxonomy. Indeed, your personalized Backflip page looks very much like Yahoo's home page.

Backflip will automatically categorize links, although the process needs more refinement. Links end up in strange places: A shortcut to the U.S. Postal Service ZIP code database ended up in Money and Finance, and a Supreme Court ruling database ended up in Media, apparently because it had RealAudio links to the arguments. Backflip claims its product will get smarter about categorizing links over time, although I added nearly a dozen links on the same topic, complete with consistent clues in the descriptions, but saw no improvement.

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