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.
Ah, so you have something like an ancillary indexing system with URLs?
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.