#4 - Backward Surfing

Recall times when you’re casually surfing and seem to be passing by too many ‘excellent’ sites? It can feel like travelling on a tour bus where there’s too much to see and no time to explore. Often, you move past a good site without favouriting or bookmarking anything simply because:

1. You’re not able to tell from a cursory look whether the page or site is worth flagging compared to what you might encounter in a few moments.

2. You’ve been hopping through many sites in a ‘linear’ fashion (i.e. following a trail of links) and so it’s hard to compare the current and previous sites.

3. You much rather finish identifying all the dozens of ‘good’ links first before going back for a second round of deeper exploration.

In essence, backward surfing works for the many situations when you’re tempted to start clicking Backspace, the browser Back button or surf the history bar because you think you’ve missed something. So here’s the tip: don’t break your surfing momentum; simply “save” your current status by duplicating your current tab or window. In the original window, you can start backward surfing to all the ’stops’ on the journey you would have in retrospect wanted to make. At each of these ’stops’, duplicate the window again before continuing backwards. 

At the end, or rather the beginning, you should now have all your interesting sites open in separate tabs without needing to use bookmarking. This means that when you finally do bookmark sites, they would really represent the best of your surfing efforts.

Browsers:

• Internet Explorer 7.0: Alt+Enter while in address bar (duplicate window)
• Mozilla Firefox: Alt+Enter while in address bar (duplicate window)
• Opera: Shift+Enter while in address bar, Hold Right+Down-Up mouse gesture (duplicate window)

Speed Value: +120%

Rating: 4 Stars

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