We bookmark a lot of sites as we browse the web, and the more sites we visit the more we find to bookmark. My regular bookmarks grew into a horribly jumbled mess as I surfed and added site after site to my list of places I would invesitgate in more detail at a later time. I should have spent some time organizing and categorizinf my bookmarks so they would be easier to use in the future, but I didn't, and I don't think I ever would spend that kind of time and energy on mere maintainance and cleanup tasks.

The first solution available, and one I adopted, was online bookmarks, which has now become a web standard. I got my del.icio.us account and just started dumping anything of non-immediate interest into my account, and thanks to the search and tagging I am more easily able to sift through the many sites I've collected.

The problem that persists is remembering to bookmark a site. I fly through many links of search results when doing research and often fail to bookmark a lot of them at the time, but later find that I probably use the info. If it's soon enough the links are often just in your browser's local history, but if not (or the history is cleared) the links need to be rediscovered from scratch.

The simple elegant solution is a permanent record of all your visited sites, automatically catalogued with zero user effort required, and stroed online to be easily accessible from anywhere. There are quite a few services and tools geared toward providing this, but three stand out as the best.

This is one of the most complete and robust solutions available. Google will save every page you visit in every window or tab, sort themn by date and time visited, organize them by domains and subdomains/directories, as well as link to Google cached versions of the page if the original is every unavailable. Google also saves your searches and organizes clicked links under the searches where you found them.

It does this all seamlessly and silently in the background, requires zero input from users, and it saves the info indefinitely. As with all Google services the great strength is in the search, and all the history links are searchable just like the rest of the web. A cool calendar shows you all your links sorted by days so you can see where your browsing is heaviest and also easily navigated to all the sites browsed on certain days.

My only disappointment with Google Web history is that to function it needs the Google Toolbar installed. For many users this isn't a bad idea, but for Firefox users many of the features in the toolbar are redundant with FF's own features or with other superior extensions. I really didn't want to install the whole toolbar for just that background function, but there's no way around it. As longas you are logged into your Google account Google will keep a history of all you searches without the toolbar, but that's not even in the realm of a complete puicture of your browsing, so you need the toolbar.

Hooeey is a pretty cool service that does mostly the same thing as Google Web History. The main difference is Hooeey can keep the history locally on your machine or on the web, making search and manipulation of recent links a lot faster than waiting for Google pages to load (which is significant because there's always a lot of noticeable delay in loading any Google service pages). Hooey has a slicker interface and includes cool link sharing tools, especially the WebTour whic lets you save a collection of pages into an "album" which you can share with anyone. It's a neat way of sending someone a collection of web pages rather than a text list of links in an email. It also saves the history as actual cached pages, so you can go to your Hooeey account and browse through all your history without ever leaving hooeey.com and visiting the links.

Hooeey's advantage of local history is lost as soon as you upload, meaning your links are either on your machine or on their site. Next, you have to manually select to upload your history. The extension can be configured to remind you at whatever interval you choose to do the upload, but it's still not a transparent background tool like Google's. Finally, the information on the pages is a bit more limited, and at a glance all you get is the bare url, page name, and date of visit (without times). You also can't edit the entries, so it's really just a simple record of the places you've visited rather than a rolling history of bookmarks like Google Web History is.

This service is most similar in feature set and functionality to Hooeey, but it's great claim to fame is that it's not a text and link list, it's a picture history of the sites you've visited. You can scroll through your online history as a ribbon of screenshots and identify sites by appearance rather than urls or page titles. It certainly looks sweet and offers the most interesting way of interacting with your browsing history.

But its limited in the same ways as Hooeey and focuses too much on the pretty visual interface rather than on efficient display of information. If you have a lot of history to sift through, doing it one site at a time by looking at screenshots is going to take forever. Also, WebMynd isn't totally free. They will only store 7 days worth of history on their servers for free, and if you want more you need to pay $10 for every 6 months you want the history stored. It's the most innovative and appealing interface, but the most limited in functionality.

My recommendation is Google Web History. It's packed with features, 100% free, and conveniently integrates with other Google services you probably already use. The main hitch (other than the sluggishness of Google services, which is an issues across all their service sites), which I guess for a lot of people isn't really a hitch, is having to install the Google Toolbar and deal with all the bulk it adds to your toolbars and context menu. It's quite customizeable, but it take a little work to clean it up and make it less obtrusive. If you're not a huge browser tweaker and haven't already added all kinds of functionality to Firefox or IE, then you may be very happy wth the stuff the toolbar adds.

If you really can't stand the toolbar, there's an alternative. When Google Bookmarks first came out Andreas Gohr made a cool extension called gBrain. It logs every site you visit into you Google Bookmarks and automatically organizes and tags them into years, months, and days. The results look almost idenical to Google Web History and I have no doubt gBrain was the inspiration for Google to make their Web History. Very conveniently for me Web History recognizes all the gBrain bookmarks and integrates with them. gBrain is still an extension installation (all the services are, because the tool has to monitor your browser), but it's a heck of a lot smaller and less intrusive (it's practically invisible) than the full-on toolbar. I've used gBrain for years and it's always functioned perfectly, but now that Google is taking hints and leveraging it's own infrastructure as well as the independent extension authors are, I'm going to give the toolbar and Web History a good run to see if it ends up being a little more featureful.