URLs map onto filenames (that’s what they originally were), so when wget downloads a URL, it’s generally fairly predictable where the contents will be located on disk.
No, that’s not what I mean. Let’s say you want to look up studies on, say, the effect of dietary sodium on CVD and you have a vague recollection that you scanned a paper on the topic a year or so ago. I understand that if you have the URL of this paper you can easily find it on your disk, but how do you go from, basically, a set of search terms to the right URL?
Oh. In that sort of scenario, I depend on my Evernote, having included it on gwern.net/Google+/LW/Reddit, and my excellent search skills. Generally speaking, if I remember enough exact text to make grepping my local WWW archive a feasible search strategy, it’s trivial to locate it in Google or one of the others.
Yes, it’s the last resort for URLs which are broken. It’s not much good having a snippet from a web page so you know you want to check it, if the web page no longer exists.
URLs map onto filenames (that’s what they originally were), so when
wgetdownloads a URL, it’s generally fairly predictable where the contents will be located on disk.No, that’s not what I mean. Let’s say you want to look up studies on, say, the effect of dietary sodium on CVD and you have a vague recollection that you scanned a paper on the topic a year or so ago. I understand that if you have the URL of this paper you can easily find it on your disk, but how do you go from, basically, a set of search terms to the right URL?
Oh. In that sort of scenario, I depend on my Evernote, having included it on gwern.net/Google+/LW/Reddit, and my excellent search skills. Generally speaking, if I remember enough exact text to make grepping my local WWW archive a feasible search strategy, it’s trivial to locate it in Google or one of the others.
Ah, I see. So your system is less of a knowledge base and more of a local backup of particularly interesting parts of the ’net.
Thanks :-)
Yes, it’s the last resort for URLs which are broken. It’s not much good having a snippet from a web page so you know you want to check it, if the web page no longer exists.