Jim has pulled me up about my use of long rambling URLs in emails I send him – I confess, it was laziness. I could (and should) have installed Bitly – which is a URL shortener which can be installed as an extension in my browser. I needed to create a Bitly account but having done that it works across my various browsers and also on my iPhone (Android app here). I have done that now – perhaps you’d like to look at it.
Another extension you might want to consider is a development of the bookmark managers (ie diigo, and the now retired Delicious) which allows you to save links to websites to re-visit later, and also read offline. The one I use is Pocket, it’s how I construct the News item for the meetings. I just save pages between meetings and then before a meeting I review them, and cut’n’paste links to this site, and sometimes (when I remember) also to the Flipboard site.
… rambling and sometimes random at that
I don’t need to shorten URLs very often, so I use tinyurl.com, which doesn’t require me to create an account.
As for bookmarks, I find the facility built into browsers to be adequate for my purposes. I also have to say that Google is so fast, I often don’t even need to go to my bookmarks list.
(KISS.)
I sort of agree with you re. the speed of searching for stuff using a search engine, eg Google, but I find that bookmark managers are useful for recording that “special” reference, which with so much “out there”, you have difficulty in remembering what, or where, it was. I used to use delicious, but then when it disappeared, I transferred to diigo – which allows you to tag your bookmarks which is useful, as well as share them – which can be useful, occasionally.
However Pocket which is a step on from just being a bookmark manager is even more useful as you can see either the whole, or an extract, of the page offline – it depends on whether you’ve looked at the page in Pocket before you went “offline”. I could also use Evernote for the same task, but I prefer to split the use cases between the two apps.
Finally, I have looked at tinyurl and will probably use it instead of bit.ly – it’s a shame that tinyurl doesn’t have such a good browser extension; it’s even more of a shame that Google stopped their service!