Meet Grabduck

This post is about our small tiny project — full-text bookmarking service Grabduck. It is a story about what kind of problems we were tackling and trying to solve and what finally came out of this. So let’s start.

See in 15 seconds why you need Grabduck

I guess, most of us are more than familiar with the issue of keeping browser’s bookmarks: we constantly read something new in internet and save links to all that drew our attention for quickly finding it in the future.

That was exactly what I did. All that mattered for me was properly saved (or shall I tell bookmarked?) in Google Chrome. When it became a lot of links, I forced myself to start a long process of their classification — so there was how a folder “Development” appeared, and then I put into it “java”, and next fit “php” and “javascript”. And after that a bunch of other technologies that I happened to be interested in that time appeared in my bookmarks folder.

However, I should tell that that was not completely right strategy — it was tricky over the time to understand what I was keeping. You know, the standard browser’s functionality does not allow you too much. Some links could have been attributed to multiple categories and sometimes I simply did not remember about the old classification and was producing a new one in the neighbourhood.

When the bookmarks became quite a lot and I frankly had no time to do the sorting job, I ended up with a promising solution to fix all this stuff (at least that time I thought it was a promising thing) — I did create an “Inbox” folder and gave myself a strict word to find some time on Fridays to sort this mess out. So the solution was found and I began to dump all which I thought was mattering to me directly into my “Inbox”. Ha-ha. This did not work as well — you know, it’s always something more interesting on Fridays which one can do instead of taking care if the mess. So all my bookmarks had been staying there in the Inbox (I counted them all once up — it was somewhere far beyond 2K). So finally I caught myself in ignoring the system system I created and looking in the inbox for the stuff I needed, in hope the article was there, if not, well, then I just “re-googled” it again.

Huh. Common, I said to myself, that’s crazy! I am a “search guy” in my daily job, so why does it remind me all the time the shoemaker’s children who usually go barefoot as everyone knows. I keep the knowledge about the search and how it works. I have an expertise in how to build it properly and generate results I need. So why I’m still experiencing these troubles?

And that was actually how the idea of Grabduck was born. The point was, why can’t we do the searching in the bookmarks exactly the same way as we’ve been doing every day with search engines like Google or Bing, meaning simply by typing search requests. After all, usually I’m searching for an article I need because I know exactly what was it about and therefore, I can properly create a search request, and second, I am sure that this article was carefully saved in my bookmarks already.

Frequently Given Answers (“opposite to FAQ” thing)

Yes, we know that this is a goose, and not a duck. But when we were looking for an image for our welcome page, it happened somehow that this wary goose we liked the best. And after all who said it must be exactly a duck? Sure, it is a goose and it is watching you.

No, we have nothing to do with the DuckDuckGo. Well it might be our desire, but no, in reality it’s not like that. Frankly speaking, we are not DDG, we are GD. When we were thinking about the name for our bookmarking service, we had no idea at all that it might refer to something already existed and famous enough and what’s more — related to almost the same search topic! But for now it’s done and our small service has beed started, so please meet Grabduck!