Closed Bug 235076 Opened 20 years ago Closed 16 years ago

implement baysian bookmark filing

Categories

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, enhancement)

enhancement
Not set
normal

Tracking

()

RESOLVED WONTFIX

People

(Reporter: bugzilla.10.magnum3065, Assigned: p_ch)

Details

User-Agent:       
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040207 Firefox/0.8

The new add bookmark dialog in Firefox is nice, however I'd like to see improved
bookmark filing.  I'd like to see the Baysian filtering from Thunderbird
integrated into Firefox, so that it could learn from your bookmark filing and
provide the most likely options for the folders to file the current page under.  

Ideally, filing a bookmark in a sub-folder would also produce an effect on the
learning of the parent folder as well.  For example, if I go to file my first
bookmark on Python programming, it may be similar to bookmarks in
Programming/C++ and Programming/Java, but not particularly biased towards either
subfolder, so the parent folder would be a good suggestion.

Now, I believe that similar suggestions have been made for email filing in
Thunderbird, so I imagine that this kind of thing will probably be worked on
there first, but I believe that it may be good to keep this suggestion in mind,
so that design decisions made there would allow for the message filing to be
ported over to bookmarks as well.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.
I think you're really overestimating the capabilities of Bayesian filtering.  
The junk mail filtering is basically determining "junk/not junk" whereas what 
you want is "predict from the contents of the page where I'm going to file it"

This is not even close to practical to consider now, marking WONTFIX.   If 
someone comes up with some form of artificial logic that could be easily 
adapted, I could see that being considered, but bayesian filtering is far too 
simple to be an accurate predictor.
Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 20 years ago
Resolution: --- → WONTFIX
Wow, my suggestion got shot down pretty quickly.  Let me clarify a bit here. 
Bayesian filtering is not some binary thing.  It doesn't simply say
"spam"/"not-spam".  Bayesian filtering is simply a way to modify your
assumptions based on new information.  While the most common uses of it have
been in simple spam filtering solutions it is capable of more than this.  

Maybe you should have a look at the discussion about this for message filing on
the Thunderbird bug report: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=181866

There's already a patch for Thunderbird that will file messages into appropriate
folders based on Bayesian learning.


Also, what I suggested is not something where getting 99% accuracy, or
false-positives is really an issue.  I expect to still have some interaction
when filing a bookmark.  This is simply a question of "Does my preferred folder
show up in the 5 item combo box, or do I have to expand the dialog and dig
through my bookmark tree?"  

I don't really think this "top 5" is out of the reach of Baysian filtering.  I
mean even if I happened to be a herpetologist as well as a programmer, a page
containing the work "python" would probably get a pretty good rating for
"Programming/Python" and "Reptilia/Squamata/Boidae" (though "Humour/Spam, Spam,
Spam, Spam" might make a reasonable choice as well <0.7854 wink>)  Making the
choice between these several options in the combo-box is much preferrable to
looking through my tree of bookmarks.

This may not be an immediate priority, but I think it's reasonable to keep this
suggestion in as an "enhancement" in order to keep it on the developers' minds.
 I'm going to look at the Thunderbird patches a bit more and see what it would
take to incorporate something similar into Firefox.

More resources:

Message filing for Pop email:
http://popfile.sourceforge.net/

Text classification Java library:
http://classifier4j.sourceforge.net/

Looking at categorizing Blog entries:
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/11/19/udell.html
Status: RESOLVED → UNCONFIRMED
Resolution: WONTFIX → ---
If someone contributes this, great.  The bug you mentioned looks promising, but
this is something that's a far-future type of thing, and I don't think it'd be a
priority at any forseeable time.  If someone wants to try it, it might be
useful.  On the other hand, I use terribly non-descriptive folder names so it'd
be less valuable to me...
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Ever confirmed: true
Summary: baysian bookmark filing → implement baysian bookmark filing
sorry for bugspam, long-overdue mass reassign of ancient QA contact bugs, filter on "beltznerLovesGoats" to get rid of this mass change
QA Contact: mconnor → bookmarks
Automatic filing is much less important now that we're moving to a much more search/tagging driven interface.  Intelligent tagging suggestions would be great, but not part of this bug.
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 20 years ago16 years ago
Resolution: --- → WONTFIX
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