What is Furl?
According to the official About Furl page:"Furl is a free service that saves the important items you find on the Web and enables you to quickly find them again. Furl archives a personal copy of every page you save. When you want to recall it, you can find it instantly by searching the full text your archived items. Each member has a personal archive of 5 gigabytes (GB), large enough to store tens of thousands of searchable items."
How does Furl work?
Basically, Furl gives you the ability to create your own searchable database of your favorite sites. Furl is similar to del.icio.us, in that the primary task that you can use Furl for is as an online, access from anywhere, list/article database. However, with Furl you can also see a quick synopsis of the articles and sites that you add to your Furl cache, rather than just a link with a brief sentence.What can I use Furl for?
Here’s a few Web search tasks that you can use Furl for:
Preserve old links. The beauty of Furl is that it actually saves copies of Web pages, rather than just the links; so if a link goes bad after a while (it happens), you can still access your content through Furl. This especially comes in handy if you’re citing something in a research paper; if your professor wants to double-check your references, and the link no longer works, you can simply direct him or her to your Furl.
You can search all of your saved bookmarks with Furl. Furl offers the convenient feature of full-text search throughout all your saved Web sites; I can’t even tell you how much this comes in handy when you’re looking for something specific.
Furl can be used as a collection point for pretty much anything you’re wanting to keep track of on the Web. For example – say you’re in the market for a new couch. You could store listings from eBay, from Craigslist, from your local newspaper, etc. all in Furl and use it as a database for your couch hunt.
Here’s another one: you can store all the recipes you find on the Web in Furl, and create your very own mega-recipe Web; completely searchable, completely accessible even if for some reason the links are no longer valid six months down the line.
Personally, I use Furl not only to bookmark sites and articles, but I also tend to use Furl as one of the best searchable treasure trove of links on the Web.
