Site Extends the Shelf Life of Bookmarks

Human memory--or rather bad human memory--has been one of the worst problems of the Information Revolution.

Here we have hundreds of millions of Web pages, storing trillions of bits of information and yet, how often have you faced this problem: “Let’s see, I remember bookmarking a page a year ago with a quote from Bill Gates in which he used the word ‘mango.’ ”

Aaaagh!

You can spend hours poring through your hundreds of bookmarks or use a search engine to plow through the estimated 800 million Web pages before you finally stumble on the quote.

The fact is that for all the achievements of the Personal Computer and Internet Age, there are few tools that have been able to bridge the gap between the perfect memory of machines with the quirky desires of humans.

One solution is being proposed by a company--Backflip--that until last week was one of the most secretive in the Web world with a project known only by its code name, iTix.

The San Francisco-based company was started by two refugees from Web browser pioneer Netscape, which was bought by America Online in March.

The Backflip project finally was unveiled last week and unlike most overhyped Web projects, this one lives up to the hoopla.

Backflip (https://www.backflip.com) provides a site that lets surfers download all the Web pages they have saved as bookmarks or favorites.

Backflip scans each of the Web sites, indexes the keywords and then organizes them into a personalized, Yahoo-like directory that can be searched at your call.

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The most obvious benefit of the Backflip system is that your bookmarks can be accessed by any computer you use, whether at work or at home, because they are saved on the Web.

But the power of Backflip is its ability to search the full text of all those bookmarked pages.

For example, most people only give their bookmarks a short description, such as “bicycling” or “Greg LeMond.”

If you are looking for a specific piece of information in that pile of bicycling-related bookmarks, you are in for a long process of scanning each one.

Backflip allows you to search all your stored pages using keywords, resulting in fast results. And because the Web pages are ones that you have bookmarked, a search generally produces useful results.

“What this really creates is a kind of photographic memory,” said Chris Misner, vice president for business development at Backflip. “This is a way of giving people the Web the way they want it.”

Backflip was founded by Misner, Netscape’s former director of strategic development and acquisitions, and Tim Hickman, a former senior project manager at the company. Hickman serves as the chief executive of Backflip.

Misner said the key to Backflip is that it allows people the power to view and organize the Web in their own way, rather than forcing them to view information through the prism of someone else’s search directory.

Once you have registered for Backflip and downloaded your bookmarks into a secure area, you place a Backflip button onto the quick link bar at the top of a browser.

Whenever you view a page that you want to save, you click the Backflip button, which indexes the words on the page and adds it to your directory.

The categorizing of your bookmarks is a bit rough at first and some of its choices may not make sense. But each time you move a bookmark and place it into its proper category, the tool is designed to learn your preferences and improve over time.

You can create and delete categories and edit the listings under them.

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Backflip makes it relatively simple to organize hundreds or even thousands of searchable bookmarks. The tool works with Microsoft Internet Explorer, version 4.0 and above, and Netscape Navigator, version 4.0 and above.

Misner said that next year, Backflip users will be able to search not just their bookmarks but also their history files, that is, the list a browser keeps of recently visited Web sites.

In addition, the company is planning to add a feature early next year that allows people to share their directories with other users.

There are other tools, such as HotLinks (https://www.hotlinks.com), and various bookmark organizing programs on the market. But Backflip’s ability to search the text of bookmarked pages and automatically organize them into categories places it well ahead of the pack.

Ashley Dunn can be reached at ashley.dunn@latimes.com.