Now Where Was I? New Ways to Revisit Web Sites

LECTRONIC bookmarks were supposed to answer the problem of Web-site recall. If you came across a site that you expected to need in the future, you simply added it to your Favorites list in Internet Explorer for safekeeping. With an application that simple, what's not to like?

Quite a bit, as it turns out. Researchers are finding that despite the early promise of bookmarks, people seem to be abandoning them.

William Jones, a research associate professor at the Information School at the University of Washington, says that bookmark lists have become "information closets" that hold a jumble of sites people never return to. Only hyperorganized users sort sites into folders, clean out dead links or click on inscrutable addresses to figure out why they were bookmarked in the first place.

"We say 'Oh my god!' and we close the door," Dr. Jones said. "We don't like to think that we are that disorganized."

He and Harry Bruce, an associate professor at the university, are leading a project called Keeping Found Things Found that they say grew out of frustrations voiced by Internet users. People would tell him that they often had to repeat a search for information that they had found once but were unable to locate again, Mr. Bruce said.

The project, which is being paid for by a three-year $378,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, is intended to shed light on the best tools for the job.

So far, observation of a few dozen people in their work environments has revealed a hodgepodge of approaches to organizing pages, and bookmarking them is not at the top of the list.

Instead, some people try to keep track of Web sites by sending themselves an e-mail message with the link and a note of why it might be useful. Others print pages or use sticky notes. Some people, the researchers found, make no attempt to save a page, counting on being able to find it again with a search engine.

When the researchers looked at how people returned to sites they had visited before, they discovered that context made all the difference. When subjects in their study had the chance to describe a site in their own words and were given the description six months later, they had little trouble finding the site again. Yet in today's typical bookmark applications, users cannot annotate sites they save.

To allow more room for context, the Washington team created Add to Favorites 2, a software prototype that enhances the Favorites feature in Internet Explorer. The prototype includes a box that enables people to enter a description of a site they want to bookmark. It also lets them e-mail the link and save it within a document folder. Over the next few months, the software will be tested by a small group of Internet users at the University of Washington.

Early tests by Dr. Jones and a few members of his research team have been discouraging, he said. People who had abandoned using Favorites were not compelled to return to using them despite the enhancements. Nonetheless, he said, the software may be worthwhile for those who do use bookmarks.

Meanwhile, the researchers have turned some of their attention to the AutoComplete feature that comes with today's Web browsers. With AutoComplete, typing a few characters of a Web address triggers software that recalls the complete address of a site previously visited that starts with the same characters, and automatically enters it. "It's a very crude tool that deserves more attention," Dr. Jones said.

But what if the user has only a vague memory of a site, without any sense of what its address might be? And how could software remind people that a site they once saw might be useful to them now?

Ben Bederson, director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland, agrees that bookmarks "are pretty hopeless." The concept is flawed, he said, "because it assumes in advance that this is a page that you want to revisit, and you don't always know that."

Software being tested at Microsoft Research takes a stab at solving that problem. Susan Dumais, a senior researcher with Microsoft who is also part of the University of Washington team, has helped develop a program called Stuff I've Seen. The software is designed to help people recall documents like e-mail messages and Web sites through a unified search interface. Keyword search results include related Web sites already visited, regardless of whether they have been bookmarked.

About 1,500 Microsoft employees are now testing versions of the software. It is not designed to be a commercial product, but its features could show up in the next release of Microsoft's operating system, code-named Longhorn and due out in late 2004 or 2005. "Many of the lessons learned from Stuff I've Seen will be incorporated into Longhorn," Dr. Dumais said.

Good search engines may eliminate the need for bookmarks or home-made filing systems altogether, according to these researchers. Both Dr. Dumais and Dr. Bederson envision living in "flatland," where folder hierarchies will be a thing of the past. Dr. Bederson, for example, has created software called NoteLens (available as a free download at www.windsorinterfaces.com) that enables people to retrieve old notes through rapid-fire keyword searches rather than by browsing through folders. He said the technology could be adapted for the recall of Web pages.

Whatever the answer, people want to feel that they are in control of their information world, Dr. Bruce said. Even as search engines improve, he expects that people will still need to rely on what he calls interventions that trigger memories of a Web page seen before. "The challenge," he said, "is getting back to it."