Browsing Convenient, Browsing Smart

If you do as much web browsing as I do, you’re always looking for ways to improve how you’re collecting and processing the vast amounts of information the Internet has to offer.

One suggestion I can make, and an enormous time saver when you want to search on something quickly, is to use the search toolbars offered by one of the major search engines. Google and Yahoo both have very good tool bars (you can download them for free) that offer quick search capability along with other features specific to their service offerings. Both are built for Internet Explorer and Firefox (Google’s FireFox toolbar is offered as an extension by a third party).


Now to the exciting part: Yahoo has a cool new feature for their toolbar called “Save to My Web.” What this nifty little button does is let you save a cached copy of a web page to your personal area of the Yahoo server for you go back to whenever you want. This takes bookmarks a couple of steps further because it is saving the actual web page not just the URL bookmark.

Why is this important? For a couple of reasons it’s something you should be interested in. Many times a page that you surf to has been called up from a database. And, as the database changes the “dynamic” page will change also.

So what if you want to keep the info from a specific dynamically served page? This is where “Save to My Web” comes in. When you click that button on the Yahoo toolbar, the page you are at will be saved up to the Yahoo server, for you to come back to time and time again. You can also save a little personal note to yourself about the page, very helpful when you look at the page weeks or months later.

So should you stop saving bookmarks? I don’t think so. But when you want to save a specific page that you know will change in the future (and you know you’ll need to reference that page’s info), “Save to My Web” is a great tool.