Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

• Why donate bookmarks?
• My bookmarks are not organized, should I donate?
• Why should I register?
• But I do not want to register
• What browsers are supported?
• OK, what do you want to do with the bookmarks?
• What is the "Top Ten Bookmarks" list on the GiveALink home page?
• How is GiveALink different from other bookmark sharing sites?
• Can I download your bookmark data?
• How can I help?
• Who are you?

Why donate bookmarks?

People like types of books, types of music, and types of clothes--they also like types of websites! We collect information about what sites people bookmark and how people organize their bookmarks because we want to measure the semantic relationship between websites. By donating your bookmarks, you let GiveALink analyze your preferences along with those of many other people. We will mine the resulting collection for interesting insights and use the information to develop novel applications. We will also share bookmark data (see question on privacy) with the Web research community, hoping to foster the development of many novel Web mining techniques and applications to search, recommendation, navigation, personalization and visualization of the Web.

My bookmarks are not organized, should I donate?

Yes, please donate your bookmarks no matter how untidy or strange they are! We are interested in the structure of the file and our algorithms are able to extract more similarity information from bookmarks that are organized in folders. But we really prefer that you donate your bookmark files unedited, the way you use them. In addition, we would like to grow our bookmark collection quickly because the more donations we get, the better our systems will be. Please challenge our algorithms and donate all of your bookmark files, regardless of what they look like.

Why should I register?

If you register, we will save your bookmark profile. This way we will be able to identify you when you come back to update your bookmarks and we can (at your request) send you reminders to update regularly. You will also be able to use personalized search and recommendation services. To register, you need to provide us with a valid email address that will serve as your username. We will not disclose your email to anybody. The only email you will receive from us is the confirmation that you have successfully registered. But, if you would like to be updated on the progress on our site, then let us know, and we will keep you informed. We can also send you reminders to update your bookmarks.

But I do not want to register

That's too bad, we really wish you would. But you can still help us by donating your bookmarks anonymously. This will help other people with similar interests find the great websites in your list!

What browsers are supported?

We can currently accept bookmark donations from people using Internet Explorer (IE), Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. In the future we might extend this list. Note that in IE, bookmarks are called favorites. Please donate the bookmarks from the browser used for donation. For example, do not use Firefox to donate Safari bookmarks. There are two reasons for this: (1) we detect your browser and use this information to parse your bookmarks; and (2) you can donate multiple sets of bookmarks if you use multiple browsers for different activities--we will store multiple sets of bookmarks from different browsers under your profile.

OK, what do you want to do with the bookmarks?

We are developing a number of exciting new applications using the semantic data we gather from your donated bookmarks. Some are already available online:

• Interactive Graph of Sites with High Generality

  We identify the most central sites on the Web, i.e. the sites with highest generality, and visualize them using the interactive package prefuse.

• Recommendation System

  Type in the address of a site that you like and we will suggest similar bookmarks. The similar bookmarks are identified from the collections of bookmarks submitted to our site.

• Search Engine

  Enter words describing the subject you are searching for and we will suggest relevant sites! This system looks a lot like Google and Yahoo. However, instead of crawling the Web to find pages that contain the search words, we match the search words against the titles and descriptions contained in our bookmark collection.

Here are some other ideas we are working on.

• Recommendation System Based on User Profiles

  This system will recommend sites based on all the bookmarks that you have submitted.

• Personalized Search

  Personalized search will be based on what you and other people with similar interests think are great websites in relation to your queries or sample sites.

• Data Mining

  We will explore new ways to distill knowledge from the huge collection of pages making up the Web. We will try to identify trends, time sequences, and popular sites based on semantic links between pages mined from bookmarks, rather than hyperlinks from page content. We will also be able to cluster both people and websites based on their similar interests and meanings, and to classify pages into personalized taxonomies.

What is the "Top Ten Bookmarks" list on the GiveALink home page?

This list shows the URLs in the GiveALink database that got highest prestige scores. Prestige is one of our global ranking measures, which is similar to PageRank. It identifies Web pages that are most central to our database, that a lot of users donate and that have high average similarity to other bookmarked Web pages. Read more about our ranking measures here.

How is GiveALink different from other bookmark sharing sites?

There are several great websites that allow people to submit their bookmarks and provide very useful services such as sharing, search, and full-text search. These include Simpy, Delicious, Furl, and Backflip. GiveALink is not competing with these sites, on the contrary we hope to collaborate with them. GiveALink is different in that we are a non-commercial research project. As such, we will make both our data and our algorithms openly available to the Web community (see question on privacy. We will also focus our energy on the development of novel Web mining techniques and applications that are not already available elsewhere. For example, we are working on a novel semantic similarity measure that exploits the hierarchical structure of bookmark files.

Can I download your bookmark data?

Yes! You can download our bookmark collection, as well as some output from our analysis algorithms, here (see question on privacy). These files are updated every night.

How can I help?

Thank you for asking! We are very happy that our users would like to get more involved! First of all, please donate all of your bookmark files, update your profile frequently, and let us know if there are some other applications that you would like to see here.

Also, help spread the news about us! Use this link to send an email to your friends who use bookmarks and encourage them to donate. By advertising GiveALink, you will help us graduate sooner and we will not have to eat instant noodles anymore. Mmmm, real food...

In addition, you can put a link from your personal webpage and blog to GiveALink. This cool logo certifies that you donated your bookmarks and also links to GiveALink.org.

Who are you?

We are a team of researchers from the Department of Computer Science and School of Informatics at Indiana University, Bloomington. The GiveALink project stemmed from brainstorming in the Networks and Agents Network. You can learn more about us here.