Bookmark

Bookmark is a facility used in browsers to provide a pointer to a Web page. Also known as "Favorites," bookmarks make it very easy for users to open their favorite Web sites without having to remember URLs.

Popular browsers like Internet Explorer , Firefox , Opera , and Safari  have the facility of bookmarking. A built-in bookmark manager allows users to organize, group and provide quick descriptions of their bookmarks. To visit a Web site, a user can simply click on the bookmark from the browser menu.

A bookmark is simply a pointer, and not the actual Web page, so it is still valid after a Web page is updated. It also still points to the Web page if the page is taken down or "broken" in some way. In short, bookmarks are just a shortcut to a file, but they do not provide any information about the current state of a Web site.

The use and value of bookmarks has evolved. Because people must often use different computers, from home to office to library to digital device, they do not want to create different lists of bookmarks on each computer. Their favorite sites are usually the same at any computer. Online bookmarking tools emerged to solve this problem, like Google Bookmarks and Yahoo Bookmarks , where people can retrieve their same list of bookmarks regardless of their location, even at public computers.

Online bookmarking tools raise a concern for privacy. Because companies like Google and Yahoo also provide email and chat services, some people are concerned that the preferences and tastes indicated in the bookmarks could lead to content-driven advertising, or to more information collected about users in the database of these service providers.

Another concept is "social bookmarking," which allows users to share their list of bookmarks with each other. Through this concept, people are able to find Web sites that are visited by like-minded people that they otherwise would not have heard of. Bookmarks are described and reviewed, and can be judged by popularity. Web sites such as Del.icio.us , Reddit  and Digg  cater to social bookmarking.

The Firefox browser has introduced live bookmarks that are Web feeds/RSS feeds that contain updated information.

Bookmark managers are software programs that easily manage and catalog bookmarks, and even alert a user when a Web site changes. Some examples are Powermarks  and Check and Get .