Furl - is there an alternative free online bookmarking service that saves a copy of the page?

November 3, 2007 5:24 PM

Furl - is there an alternative free online bookmarking service that saves a complete copy of each page?

I've been using Furl - http://furl.net/ - for a while now, and quite like it, but it's got some issues like not saving pages properly, usability issues, poor searching, etc. Does anyone know of a good bookmarking service out there that does the same job as Furl - particularly saving a copy of the page on their server as well as bookmarking the actual link - but has better usability and searching, and is more reliable?

Suggestions for paid services as well as free would be great. Thank you very very much :)!

posted by katala to computers & internet (9 comments total)

I like zotero, but that might be too much for you.
posted by necessitas at 7:22 PM on November 3, 2007 [1 favorite]

Absolutely! I love MyWeb from Yahoo! for the very reasons you mentioned. They save an identical copy of the page that you bookmark. The search within MyWeb is based on Yahoo! Search. In fact, the reason the saving of the pages work so well is that they use the same engine as they do for "See Cached Page" in the regular Yahoo! search results. I dumped del.icio.us a while back and am so glad I did. One note: when you save a bookmark, you won't see the "saved page" on the Yahoo! servers for a few minutes. Also, you can upload all of your current bookmarks from Furl (OPML file) and it will generate your new collection - complete with perfectly formatted "saved pages."
posted by Gerard Sorme at 8:17 PM on November 3, 2007 [1 favorite]

I used to use Spurl.net before switching to Furl.net. Basically the same idea.

Now, is Furl actually not saving pages for you, or are you getting "Partial Saves" and perceive that to be an issue? A "partial save" happens when Furl is able to bookmark the page, but can't save a local copy of it for viewing incase the actual webpage goes down. No service will be able to get around the "Partial Save" issue, since this indicates that the webpage you are trying to bookmark is using a Robots.txt to prevent services like Furl from crawling their webpages.
posted by bumper314 at 10:07 AM on November 4, 2007

Actually, I take that back, I use Spurl.net now and moved away from Furl.net. Here's a good comaprison of the to services.
posted by bumper314 at 10:11 AM on November 4, 2007

When my archive grew to several thousand pages Furl was no longer able to search it. It was slow to bring up any page and frequently failed to bring up topic pages.

I switched to Yahoo! MyWeb even though I was worried because there didn't seem to be a way to store a local copy of your archive. I'm beginning to regret it now. None of the last 500 pages I've saved has a link to view the copy. The next 100 pages have the link but I only get an error when I try to view it.

Spurl doesn't seem to allow you to keep a local backup of your data either. I've tested them out in the past and when I logged in I had one bookmark. I also spurled something today. Neither of them seem to have a cached copy. bumper314, is spurl actually working for you right now? Maybe something's wrong with me. Gerard, is MyWeb working for you?

I'm going to take a good look at Zotero. If you're also willing to consider having the primary archive stored locally then you might also want to look into Scrapbook and Slogger.

If Zotero doesn't work out then I'm going to use a combination of MyWeb and Slogger. MyWeb will allow me to organize my bookmarks with tags and also to search them. If the original page has disappeared or changed and the MyWeb cache is broken then I can find it in Slogger. An alternative to the MyWeb/Slogger combination would be Google Web History and bookmarks with Slogger. Google web history would allow me to search the live web versions of my entire surfing history. Google bookmarks are integrated with Google web history so you can bookmark and tag noteworthy pages to keep them separate from the rest.

If you're not actually interested in archiving entire pages and would settle for archiving snippets then you should look at Google Notebook. You can organize snippets into notebooks and with tags. And you can export notebooks to Google Docs and then save them for a local copy.

Personally, I think Zotero is the best answer. I just wanted to contribute a warning against Yahoo! MyWeb. I guess it must work for a lot of people but not for me.
posted by stuart_s at 11:45 AM on November 4, 2007

Yahoo! MyWeb allows you to save a local copy if you check the box with each individual entry. They used to automatically do it on imported OPML files, but for some reason they no longer do. But if you start with your first saved page, it will save a copy - and the search is a thousand times better than Furl's.
posted by Gerard Sorme at 1:37 PM on November 4, 2007

You should try Diigo.com. Among a heap, and I mean a heap, of other features, it caches every bookmarked page.
posted by richardh at 3:10 AM on November 7, 2007

Wow, diigo is amazin'. Try diigo first, before you look at spurl etc. -- you won't be sorry.
posted by sdt33 at 12:04 PM on November 11, 2007

Thank you all very much for your responses :)!! I checked out all of the links you provided. In the end I've decided to try out Zotero as I really like how it saves a local-copy to your PC, as well as a link to the page, plus the search is powerful and I can make notes and annotations and lots of lovely subcategories.

Also since I'm already using my USB at work every day anyway I can just run Zotero from that and make nightly backups. A tad fiddly yes but I think it will be worth it for the security of knowing my cached pages will always exist.

Thank you again!! :)
posted by katala at 3:12 AM on November 12, 2007