The impact of bookmarks and annotations on refinding information

Abstract

Refinding information has been interwoven with web activity since its early beginning. Even though all common web browsers were equipped with a history list and bookmarks early enough to facilitate this need, most users typically use search engines to refind information. However, both bookmarks and search based tools have significant limitations that impact their usability: the former are known to be hard to manage over the course of time, whereas the latter require the user to recall a specific combination of keywords or context. Most importantly, though, both are particularly inappropriate in cases where a piece of information is contained within an unstructured web page. In this paper, we present in-context annotation as a more efficient alternative to these methodologies. To verify this claim, we conducted a study in which we compare the performance of experienced users in all three approaches while revisiting specific pieces of information in the web after a long period of time. The outcomes suggest that in-context annotation clearly outperforms both traditional strategies.