Everyone at some point in the past must have dropped bookmarks. Remember the times prior to Google? Bookmarking was lots of useful. What if that awesome site you discovered the other day wasn't bookmarked and got forgotten? Searching for it could easily be a fruitless mission. But there came Google, and most of the new users that were now arriving and still arrive to the web today may even not be aware of the existence of bookmarks, that tool of the browser that lets them remind useful or largely accessed links. Why should they? They have Google, the thing that reads their thoughts and never presents anything but what they want in the first result.
Of course bookmarks are still useful and the proof of that is, for example, Del.icio.us, but for a totally different purpose, the purpose of being a warehouse of links we think we may find useful in the future. We are talking about website launching here and even things like the Bookmarks toolbar in your browser are getting pretty useless by now with the recent improvements on Google, namely Google Search Wiki and Google Labs' experiment KeyboardShortcuts.
Let me first talk about Keyboard Shortcuts and what an awesome google labs feature it is. It's a known fact in computers that keyboards are much more faster to work with than the mouse. This experiment brings exactly that. The ability to be able to mouselessly scroll through the search results with keys 'J' and 'K'. But the best part is in the fact that the first result is always highlighted by default and a simple Return over a search result will get to that website. You won't loose that second of getting to the mouse (which will probably take itself most of total time wasted if you're not using a touchpad on a laptop), moving it and clicking on the first result. Your search will get where it's supposed to be in a split second.
This would all mean little if Google had attributed a key to the "I'm feeling lucky button" besides the return to the usual search. That way, searches done for website launching would be direct, and faster.
But you can still improve a little more with what is currently available, and another good thing is Google Search Wiki. With it you can add or remove results from a certain query, make your own websites the first on google (if not) and thus faster accessed. But why are we still typing all that text to get to a website, if Google Search Wiki lets us make any query a direct path to the result we defined? Why not start making our own aliases like searching on google for "tc", and right after the appearance of the results, simply pressing Return with the keyboard shortcut experiment to get to TechCrunch instead of TC Electronic, Teachers College or ThomsonCenter who could mean nothing to you. All with a faster than anything "tc" + Return + Return on google.
This is what I've been recently thinking, and decided to do, but this usage of Google has a website launcher, and our tweaking of its own tools to give us faster access to the websites we want is problematic. Google has not yet confirmed if the search Wiki choices of the users will ever have any influence in the global results, but if they ever do, search could be compromised with our urge to faster and faster access to what matters to us but to anyone else.
Anyway, I think still very few people are aware of the productivity boost they can have by using these tools, so I thought I better pass the word.
