Some urls/webpages just will not be bookmarked (been going on for several months)

[J Yang]

About 1 of every 5 or 6 webpages I try to bookmark in google.com/bookmarks doesn't get added. I end up having to strip the url in the url field down to just the domain and paste the complete url to the comment field just to have a record of the page. And sometimes stripping the url down to just the domain doesn't work either -- somehow there's something in www.sitename.com or the site description name that doesn't get accepted by Google Bookmarks.

There's absolutely no pattern that I can discern. It's not weird characters or something. Webpages that get bookmarked and webpages that don't get bookmarked have nothing different between their urls that I can tell, and webpages within a domain/site don't get bookmarked and other pages within the same domain/site do get bookmarked.

And it's absolutely consistent through time -- if I come back a couple minutes later, or a week later, the same webpage won't get bookmarked, and the same other pages will. So not a general temporary glitch with Google's servers affecting all requests randomly.

(And it's not a censorship issue either -- not that I think Google has such a policy in effect -- the pages that don't get bookmarked are completely random, innocuous, indistinguishable from other sites.)

FOR EXAMPLE, this page will not get bookmarked, and as mentioned I had to strip the url down to the domain name (http://www.zdnet.com) and paste the complete url to the comment field to get it accepted as a bookmark: http://www.zdnet.com/article/rip-windows-media-center/

... while other pages within www.zdnet.com at the same moment will consistently get bookmarked.

Anyone else come across this? Anyone from Google weigh in? Thx.

[Andrew]

In the past few days I have noticed that this happens to me too - some URLs do not get added to my bookmarks, while others do. I haven't precisely quantified the effect, but about 1 in every 5-6 quoted by the OP seems about right.

An example of a URL that will not bookmark is https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2019/08/a-very-deep-dive-into-ios-exploit.html 

Investigations so far 

• Adding a fake parameter can make the URL bookmarkable, but only if it is not stripped off in serving the page. So https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2019/08/a-very-deep-dive-into-ios-exploit.html?t=1 is bookmarkable! However medium.com strips off the fake parameters.
• Although I have a lot of bookmarks, it is not (directly) that the bookmark store is full because after a failure to bookmark I can still add other URLs successfully.
• I used Chrome Developer Console to stop the pop-up window closing, in case an error was being reported but was being missed as the window had closed. However the bookmarking request returns 200 and there is no error indication in the response. 
• It's consistent over time - so it does not seem to be a transient issue.
• It's not (directly) related to the domain - so other pages on googleprojectzero.blogspot.com bookmark OK (and without a fake parameter)
• I cannot see a linking factor among URLs that won't bookmark - it's not domain, length, URL structure, unusual characters ....

I've never noticed this in the past, although I normally have just trusted that the bookmark pop-up has done its work OK, but it's possible that it is a longstanding issue now that I have found the earlier post.

Now I am having to check each bookmarking before discarding the original page - and keeping a growing list of unbookmarkable pages separately.

[greg heil]

Andrew

i was able to add the gBM:

https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2019/08/a-very-deep-dive-into-ios-exploit.html

>Both through the "add bookmark" interface on the main BM page and via my Tampermonkey script using a bookmarklet as per usual...

>i should note the latter auto adds a " " to the URL field. i regularly change this field (by adding #1, #2 ...) when i exceed the character limit (~2K bytes) of the comment field. The notion is that i can then use a script to combine them when i do download them. i also tag such clusters with #.

~greg
http://krsnadas.org

--

from: Andrew <andrew...@gmail.com>
reply-to: google-b...@googlegroups.com
to: Google Bookmarks <google-b...@googlegroups.com>
date: Sep 4, 2019, 6:33 AM
subject: Re: Some urls/webpages just will not be bookmarked (been
going on for several months)

[Andrew]

Greg

Thanks for your input.

I am still unable to add https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2019/08/a-very-deep-dive-into-ios-exploit.html on my principal Google account. I get the same failure through the GBM main page Add Bookmark function, through the "vanilla" pop-up and through the pop-up enhanced by your Tampermonkey script. I checked for whether there were any whitespace characters at the beginning or the end of the URL or the title that might be causing a problem, but could not find any.

However:

• I can add http://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2019/08/a-very-deep-dive-into-ios-exploit.html (http not https) on my principal account
• I can add https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2019/08/a-very-deep-dive-into-ios-exploit.html with the bookmark pop-up if I log into a secondary Google account (and different bookmark database)

Very puzzling!

[greg heil]

Andrew

>As you suggested gBMs is very sensitive to the exact spelling of the "location" (a parameter passed by the Bookmarklet JS), spaces etc.

>i have north of 3K gBMs (have not got an exact count) ... it is much less than the 10K limit you discovered. i do have (very large) comments though, so i am likely pushing the same storage costs.

>Perhaps you are the Canary for yet another (hidden) hard limit? Let us know if you get any further insights.

~greg
http://krsnadas.org

--

from: Andrew <andrew...@gmail.com>
reply-to: google-b...@googlegroups.com
to: Google Bookmarks <google-b...@googlegroups.com>

date: Sep 4, 2019, 8:53 AM

subject: Re: Some urls/webpages just will not be bookmarked (been
going on for several months)

[Andrew]

I am still getting this issue.

(1) it occurs on very roughly 1 in 40-60 of bookmarking attempts. It very rarely happens in two consecutive bookmarking attempts.

(2) changing the URL non-significantly normally fixes the problem.

(3) it is not just the particular length of a URL alone. 

For (2) and (3) I had a case where the original URL failed, when I added a non-significant "?t=1" it also failed, but when I changed the added text to "?t=2" it worked

[greg heil]

Andrew

>Note that Google Bookmarks replaces the URL of the bookmark with a "redirected" version. For this reason (amongst others) the first item of my contents for a BM is the actual plain text URL.

>Eg earlier you mentioned issues

>>I can add http://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2019/08/a-very-deep-dive-into-ios-exploit.html (http not https) on my principal account

>(BTW is that URL still bad for you? Maybe over time their is variance?) For me the "googly redirected" form becomes:

https://www.google.com/url?q=https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2019/08/a-very-deep-dive-into-ios-exploit.html&usd=2&usg=AFQjCNH1liJWS4anpesa5fEwZT-6o38JBQ

>One can "decruft" this and get out the plain text URL: take the "q=" argument and convert all of its internal symbols back from an encoded form to ascii. Eg %23 is "#" ascii. The encoding is needed by Google to transport that URL to their servers before redirecting you.

>i would like to know more about that "usg" variable... what else it does etc. Eg cnn.com/#1 & cnn.com/#2 generate very different usg's though they go to the "same" page.

>Possibly somewhere in Google redirection machinations lies the bug, you are suffering from.

>Anyone else have similar symptoms? i cannot reproduce it. Possibly because i circumvent as many of Googles circumlocutions as i can.

~greg
http://krsnadas.org

--

from: Andrew <andrew...@gmail.com>

to: Google Bookmarks <google-b...@googlegroups.com>
date: Feb 17, 2020, 3:24 AM

subject: Re: Some urls/webpages just will not be bookmarked (been
going on for several months)