How is Google Chrome able to guess which folder to place a bookmark?

Asked by LostInParadise (32183

) March 3rd, 2016

Usually the default folder offered is the last folder that was used to store a bookmark, but every so often Chrome takes a guess as to which folder to use and it does surprisingly well. I just came across the site Less Wrong. I have not spent any time on it, so I don’t know that much about it. I decided to bookmark it for future investigation. I was not sure where I wanted to place the bookmark, but Chrome offered my Advocacy folder, which seemed as good a spot as any. How did they come up with that?

Observing members: 0

Composing members: 0

1 Answer

They probably use a machine learning algorithm. If I had to guess, it parses some of the text on the page and looks for words that could be associated with the name of your folder (“Advocacy”). Or, if it’s really fancy, it might also parse some of the text on the pages of the other sites that are located in your Advocacy folder and try to make an association between that text and the text it saw on Less Wrong.

Mariah (25883

)“Great Answer” (2

) Flag as…