Opera Browser Wiki : StickySearches

Sticky Searches for Bookmarks/Notes/Contacts

Opera's mail client, M2, has innovated well in using 'access points' to organise email. The mails are stored in a database, and dynamic access points allow multiple views of the same data. Email contains rich amounts of data to allow the filtering system to work well. In bookmarks and contacts however, this meta-data is much more sparse, so rewriting bookmarks/notes/contacts to use access points would not work well. But by using the functions already built-in to Opera ('quick find'), it would be easy to implement a system that would have almost all of the functionality of access-points without abandoning the standard folder hierarchy. Here is what Opera needs to do to implement this:

• When doing a 'quick-find' in the bookmarks panel/manager, a lock button allows the user to make it "sticky".
• The sticky search then gets saved as a (virtual) folder, editable just like any other folder.
• Selecting the folder brings up the list of bookmarks that match the search, just like 'quick find' currently does. This uses nothing more than the already built-in functions in Opera.
• The user can add new bookmarks to a virtual folder by dragging to that folder - Opera would append the search term to the bookmark's description field - effectively adding the meta-data necessary for the quick-find.

That would allow BOTH access point type interface AND hierarchical folders to co-exist. New users could stick to what they know best (bookmarks in folder hierarchies), and power users could construct rich organisation, where bookmarks could co-exist in multiple categories. If wanted, a user could store ALL his bookmarks in one real folder, and then use sticky searches for ALL organisation - being exactly ANALOGOUS to the M2 model.

Extending the Idea:

To improve the power of such a system, it would be nice to be able to search the 'date created' and 'date accessed' fields. That way one could easily search for bookmarks created in July for example, or the 20 most recent bookmarks etc. Adding more meta-data would always also help - Opera is already unique in that it uses <meta/> description on the page when adding new bookmarks (though does not look at <meta/> keywords). Doing more data mining when adding a bookmark could help even more. Here are some ideas:

1. Make date accessed a field which stores the last 20 visit times or so - thus allowing visiting patterns to be analysed in more depth.
2. Store the referrer of the bookmarked page — this would allow the immediate link relations to be kept.
3. Slightly more advanced, iterate through the DOM extracting <h1> etc. words, or through the document text and look for keywords already specified by the user as a Sticky Search. That way, new bookmarks which contained the same keyword could be optinally tagged.

Adding regular expressions (RegExp) to the quick-find box would also greatly enhance the power of this system. Regular expressions are already available in M2, so should be easy to implement here.

Others:

• How to build a better Browser - Contains some discussion on improving bookmark handling - StickySearches fit this description nicely.
• Epiphany browser uses dynamic categories to organise its bookmarks - though it is not fully realised.
• OmniWeb5 uses something similar to M2's pre-defined access points to select subsets of bookmarks (filters), but it is not a full database system AFAIK (never played with it though).

Categories

CategoryOpera

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