Back in 2005 Google launched a bookmark management service that was designed to privately store links to your favorite sites. A few months after the launch a Firefox extension called gBrain popped up that used Google Bookmarks in a rather unique way. Once installed it would basically bookmark each and every site that you visited creating a searchable history. You could, of course, exclude certain sites from appearing, but generally speaking every site earned a place in your Google Bookmarks.
The extension has been available for about two years now, and as of a few weeks ago it got retired. The developer of the extension decided to pull it down after Google kindly asked if he’d remove it. Why was it a problem for Google? Here’s what the developer had to say:
The problem with my extension was something I hadn’t imagined: a scaling problem. Hehe, Google had scaling problems
.
The gBrain extension creates a lot of bookmarks. Several thousands a month. And the Google bookmarks system was never made with this amount in mind. What made things worse (and I didn’t knew that), the bookmarks are connected to the normal web search. Whenever you use the web search, it checks it against your Google bookmarks. You can easily imagine what problems can come up when you have a several 10 or even 100 thousands of bookmarks…
That’s understandable, and very interesting that Google had a scalability problem. I guess Google doesn’t have a lot of resources dedicated to their bookmarking system.
The developer of the extension didn’t mind taking down the extension because Google was nice about the whole thing. He even got to talk to an engineer who explained what the problem was. Plus he got a free shirt and memory card reader unexpectedly shipped to him.
The extension is still available from various sites including the Mozilla FTP, but this probably isn’t something a lot of people would use.
Apart from a built-in way to have your navigation history synchronised between various computers, Firefox 3 provides enough resources and features to replace it: the AwesomeBar, Places, and 90 days of history. So the pull back came at the right moment for those who used the extension
If companies were more gentle with their take-down requests, they’d go much more smoothly. This is a prime example.
True. One of the benefits of the extension was that you’re history was available from any computer you had web access from. That can be helpful if you’re frequently hopping between multiple computers… this extension can keep a central history source.
That’s what I was thinking. The fact that they let the guy talk to a Google engineer regarding the problem showed that they actually have respect for developers making use of their services.
Great article.
Could you give us credit for the use of the Google Bot.
[evisibility.com]
A simple link back will do the trick.
Thanks!
Doing a search for “Google Bot” in Google images is what turned up your creation. There were so many different sites that used it we didn’t know which one created it. I’ll admit that I didn’t look very hard for the source since most of the time it’s a dead end. We went ahead and added the credit to the article though… thanks for the comment.
THanks!