Mitch Kapor likes to solve problems. In the 80’s, he was the guy behind Lotus 1-2-3, the first killer app for computers. More recently he decided to tackle a a simpler problem – synchronizing Firefox bookmarks across multiple computers. His popular Firefox plugin, Foxmarks, has been downloaded 700,000 times and has 350,000 active users.
All those users create some very well organized bookmark data. Unlike Del.icio.us, where people throw thousands of bookmarks for later reference, users tend to have fewer, but more important, bookmarks linked directly from their browser. And they spend more time properly annotating those bookmarks, Kapor says. So far, Foxmarks is tracking 250 million bookmarks, from 20 million unique URLs.
And now Kapor, along with his partner, Todd Agulnick, are going to use that data to launch a new search engine. Expect it to debut in a few months.
The Foxmarks search engine is based entirely on user bookmarks and the associated metadata. Don’t expect pages and pages of results like you get with Google. But you will get a few results for most queries that are highly relevant and on target. When returning and ranking results, Foxmarks takes into consideration the text in the title of the URL, the names of any folders people have put the bookmarks in, and any descriptions added by users. All of this information is shown in the results. See the very hazy screen shot below for the current user interface, which Kapor says will change before launch.
Kapor demo’d the product for me over the weekend at Foo Camp, and it definitely has a “wow” factor. Searches for most things ended up with incredible results.
Foxmarks also shows if the results appear on Google and Yahoo, and on what page in the results they appear. For many of the queries, the top result on Foxmarks was quite obviously the perfect result – but it appeared, if at all, deep on the result set for Google and Yahoo. Terms that are likely to have a lot of SEO pollution (ecommerce in particular), the results were strikingly better on Foxmarks v. Google.
Compare Foxmarks to recently launched Mahalo, which also provides human powered results. The big difference between the two startups is that Mahalo’s results are created for the explicit purpose of providing a search service, whereas Foxmarks is using the fact that excellent data is being created as a byproduct for its primary service to create a search service on the side. We’ll have to wait until a full launch of Foxmarks to do a side-by-side comparison.
I would like to know if there is anything to prevent any SEO? I’m finding Google to really be unsuccessful to find what I want these days (I noticed this mid last year when all of a sudden the search results were not the same).
I don’t know whether it was an algorithm change or something similar, however more and more sites are coming through in my search results that are basically junk mail.
I would like to see the project evolve, however I can see a way that SEO’s could flood this service and ruin it for all of us.
Please please please give Google a run for its money.. Please..
Brilliant.
I wonder if this has implication on searching for specifically across Social Networks? The Profile Aggregation & Online Identity Management area will be following this closely…
MJK
http://www.profilefly.com
Aggregate & Promote entire your Online Identity
It is even easier to spam a service like that. If this ever becomes popular, spam will quickly degrade results.
How does this stand a chance against spammers?
Yawn…….
I think he set his *sights* on a simpler problem.
This is good news!
Foxmarks keep getting better all the time and Google won’t be able to buy them out! Yay!
It’s great to see Mitch getting another success after the calamity of Chandler. I’d still love to see him do Lotus Agenda on the Web though.. no-one has come even close so far (Stikkit is about as close as it gets).
Am I the only one who does not see HUGE privacy concerns with this? I have some links in my bookmarks that I would honestly rather have kept private – if there is no option to disable inclusion into the search engine, then sadly I’ll have to drop my foxmarks usage.
I don’t want my server/website management url’s escaping into the wild. (I know, I know – anyone can find them, but why facilitate)
Just wondering how these privacy issues will be addressed. There could be lots of personally identifying information in bookmarks.
Ummmm…Not to take away from Mitch but wasn’t VisiCalc the first killer app?
It basically got IBM off their duff and into the desktop computer market. 123 and Excel followed on as evolutions didn’t they?
Mitch is one of my early computer heroes.
He freed us from that paper worksheet.
Good fortune, Mitch.
Yeah, last thing I need is my Webmin URLs out and about.
I think any popularity at all is going to ruin this one, they’re better off with a small known user group than opening it up. I know I’d spam it a little by bookmarking my own sites.
Thank god someone mentioned SEO pollution for once
@4, You better change your sig from, Aggregate & Promote entire your Online Identity”, to “Aggregate & Promote [your entire] Online Identity”.
I am now checking all of my FF extensions to see what info could be compromised anytime the “generous” author of one of them decides they might want to make a service with the data they’ve collected. Now to embed within my memory that widgets/extensions and so on could be dangerous.
I’m sure that group that intends to target stumbleupon for mkt purposes will be looking at this too.
There is indeed no such thing as Free Lunch
.. Good luck to Mitch..
Is Foxmarks a Google killer? Probably not. But: they have a growing asset with their human powered index, and the core bookmark-syncing system provides a value-added vector for spreading the tool and the brand. A flurry of press coverage could provide it with the impetus it needs to grab a piece of the search pie.
Is Foxmarks a Mahalo killer? Yes. Search engines fall on a continuum of totally alogorithmic (Google) and totally human (DMOZ, Mahalo). Foxmarks sits in the middle, occupying what I think is the sweet spot – it blends the volume handling of the algorithm with the data categorization of humans, adds in aggregation to increase credibility and smooth outrider results, and bundles it all together.
Google has the BROWSER SYNC plugin for firefox, which does the same thing (sync bookmarks, and optionally cookies, and store them in the googleplex). If collaborative bookmark mining turns out to be any threat to google it will refine and promote browser sync, and remove the market for this product in one fell swoop. Nobody has to sign up for foxmarks, but most people now have to have a google account anyway, so the incremental effort of getting them to introduced to browser sync, over foxmarks, is easy.
What about Google Browser Sync??!?! Works great for me
apart from the privacy issue, i think this is actually a great product. — although i didnt expect them to use the booksmarks on my browser.
waiting for the first beta here…
Actually, i do like the watch on his wrist…it’s that a LCD from back in the 70’s?
Lotus 1-2-3 changed accounting. I used to teach 1-2-3 classes back in the day and remember how much better it was than Excel back then. We bow to him.
Easily the most intelligent attempt I’ve seen at human-powered results. I imagine that integrating it with a traditional search engine would be pure gold. As many other commenters have noted, spam will be the single largest problem for these guys, but I still think Google should buy them quick.
@Neil Kelty – Yes I agree with you on the privacy concerns. I too have admin links bookmarked that I wouldn’t want listed in search results. But at the same time I’m sure foxmarks wouldn’t want those sort of links in results.. so either they will employ a fancy smart algorithm that will exclude unique bookmarks, or allow us (with some forewarning!) a method to exclude precious bookmarks from their aggregation.
I am more upset that I didn’t think of foxmarks
I use Foxmarks… what they should concentrate on is NOT using 99% of my CPU whenever the thing syncs my bookmarks.
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I’ve thought about this idea off and on over the last 8 years and always assumed that it had already been done somewhere. Does anyone know if it has or hasn’t been done before?
Well Yoono already does this, with some success for about a year.
I really wonder why it is not even mentionned in this article, since TC already knows about Yoono.
This is an old idea no? Wasn’t there some Xerox PARC spin-out that did this and patented shared bookmark search ages ago?
This *was* done before.
The startup company (now defunct) was called ULinkIt, then Nectaris then Quiver. Just do a search for “Quiver bookmarks”. Inktomi acquired Quiver back in 2002, then it sold it’s enterprise search business (which included the remains of Quiver’s technology) to Verity. At this point I lost track of it… Seed investors (such as myself) in Nectaris saw no return on our invetment.
- Uri
Come on guys ! Let us keep this in perspective. This is at best going to be a niche thing. It is never going to be as ubiquitous as a crawling search engine. I agree with one of the comments that said this thing will work best while it is not too popular.
This is one of the best ideas I have seen in years.
I install Foxmarks on every computer I use, and it works great.
I have always said that Google is just a better idea away from being knocked off, exactly like it did to Yahoo!
And it is awesome to see the inventor of an original PC cornerstone in the web development game with a great idea! I’m getting kind of tired of hearing stories about the 20-somethings with the youtube du jour.
Foxmarks is great … but I have one question to Mitch Kapor: where is Chandler?
>>> Mitch Kapor likes to solve problems. In the 80’s, he was the guy behind Lotus 1-2-3, the first killer app for computers.
||| Mitch Kapor likes to solve problems. In the 80’s, he was the guy behind Lotus 1-2-3, the first killer app for computers. |||
HUH? Technically, the first killer app “for computers” was probably COBOL. The first killer app for +personal computers+ was VISICALC.
123 was the first killer spreadsheet for the IBM PC.
Let’s get the facts straight.
This does look like a great idea /
– I mean I only have great books – bookmarked under “books I want”
– I have great sites under “design research”
– I have the best sites for “voluntary simplicity” –
– Just a overall good idea…
Why not use the google toolbar. There’s no need to *syncronize* the bookmarks because they are stored in one common place. Plus you get access to your other google services quickly.
Kapor didn’t invent the spreadsheet he “innovated” it from Dan Bricklin et.al. who created VisiCalc, the first killer spreadsheet that brought the the Apple II into the office long before IBM had an inkling of the “PC”. Get your fact straight.
Kapor didn’t know a spreadsheet from his ass before Bricklin demonstrated to him and let him see the source code. Had DMCA been in effect, Bricklin’s IP would have been protected and he would have been the billionaire.
http://hbswk.hb...chive/1271.html
I look forward to seeing what he does with this.
For anyone looking for a basic approximation of this, just visit:
http://del.icio...us/popular/evdo (single term)
or
http://del.icio.../tag/iphone+app (multiple terms).
I find that I get a much more refined list of results when I use del.icio.us as a search engine, especially if I want to restrict the result set to “vetted” sites. For example, last week I was trying to find good EVDO comparison pages. Going to Google yielded thousands of sites, and I wasn’t sure that they would be what I was looking for. Executing that search at del.icio.us was a much quicker and easier way to get good results.
I’m actually surprised that Yahoo! hasn’t pushed that use of the service more. Or, really, at all.
This is new? http://jabrams.com/hotlinks/
- (Social) bookmarks + multiple browsers + sync ==> Smarky at http://www.simp.../firefox-smarky (and https://addons....efox/addon/4702 ).
Oh, how the mighty have fallen
First he blows an opportunity to market his pioneering spreadsheet to Windows users, and now he writes a freaking bookmark program for a web browser?
Mitch – grow the hell up, get your ass out of the 60’s, and stop thinking that you’re the bomb.