retrieving users' bookmarks

Hi

I need to retreive users' bookmarks in my web site. is there any way to do it using javascript?

No. Thank goodness.

I know the security issues, but it is a bit different. there are multiple links in my website that users should select some of them. I need to know which links they have selected. I thought it is good to ask them to bookmark their favorite links and then I retrieve them. is there any other way for this purpose but bookmarking?

Checkboxes.

the web page shows the results of a search created by a search engine. I know how to make check boxes but I don't know how to create them in a webpage which is generated by a search engine.

You can write a redirector servlet that records which of the links was clicked, and then redirects to the actual URL. So a link would not look like this:

http://www.some-other-server.com/some-dir/some-page.html

but instead be:

http://www.your-server.com/redirector?url=http://www.some-other-server.com/some-dir/some-page.html

(note that you need to URL-encode the target URL)

but clicked links are not necessarily the favorites. the user may click a link to just see what is there.

So you want to track which pages your users visit even when they don't go there through your site? That sounds like a privacy issue.

no, I just want to know which of the links that are suggested to users, as a result of a search engine in my web site, are users' favorites. but my point is that users may click on one of the suggested links just to see the content and that link could not necessarily be their favorite.

You can let users upvote (or "+1") suggested links, like Google recently introduced. That gets in the way of the natural flow, though: if users like a link, they may not go back to the search results page, and thus don't get a chance to "+1" the link. They only go back to the page for more results if they didn't like the link they clicked on. Sort of a Catch-22.

it is not a bad idea, but what if users want to select multiple suggested links as their favorites? in this case they have to go back to the page of search results several times.

Do you want to write a browser extension? Then it is possible, but the API is certainly different from browser to browser. And the user has to install it, obviously.

ok, how is it possible for IE for instance?

That is something you'll probably need to get from Microsoft.

What I suggested is the only technical solution to do this. Unless you are writing an intranet application this will not be a practical solution; except when you want to write a browser extension that highlights every link on every page that is bookmarked (sounds... slow). But then this would not be the right forum for this - especially not for the Internet Explorer.