In order to check out, say, an urban legend.


Among the vast quantities of mail that I receive, urban legends take up a small, though special, place. About twice a month a story shows up in my inbox begging to be believed. As I've noted before I don't pass these on. I do, however, check out many of them.

How is this best done? In the past I'd turn to my bookmarks, find the folder that holds the urban legends sites, go to one of these, and either run a search or look for what I'm interested in via their index. (These challenges to my searching skills often arrive during the day, but verifying them from work proves to be rather difficult.)

But I've found that I've stopped doing things this way. There's no point in rifling through my bookmarks. It's much easier simply to run a Google search on the particular terms that I'd like to find, either with our without the term "urban legend" included. Invariably, confirmation or denial of the veracity of the story I'm trying to check is among the very first items in the results. The same system works just as well for virus warnings (or more accurately, virus hoaxes) which continue to bombard my inbox.

Those Urban Legend and virus hoax sites, and much more, are still there in my bookmarks files. I certainly wouldn't remove them. As I've admitted, I get to them more than just occasionally. But I don't access them from my bookmarks – I go straight to Google and run a search. And I often do the same sort of thing when I want to find something else as well: I'll remember some keywords in the title or the content of an article I want to view again, and instead of looking for it in my bookmarks, I'll search for it straight from Google. And find it.



Go to: Bye-bye Bookmarks