If you spend a lot of time online doing research, pursuing your hobbies or otherwise finding and retrieving information, you could find yourself visiting a lot of search engines and tending to a large number of accounts like RSS readers and bookmarking tools. 43 Marks is a new service that offers web search, bookmarking and RSS aggregation — all in one place.

Search

The search tool is simple but convenient. You can do the same search on Google, Yahoo, Bing and Wikipedia with just a click. On the downside, the search results are from Google Custom Search and similar services, so there is no way to extend your search to include news, blogs, images etc.

Bookmarks

When you sign up for an account with 43 Marks, you find lots of pre-defined bookmarks in twelve categories including shopping, movies, email, travel and more. You are free to delete or add bookmarks, to rearrange the order of bookmarks and categories and to add more categories as needed.

Unfortunately, there is no way to import or export bookmarks. So if, like me, you have hundreds of bookmarks stored in another service, moving to 43 Marks will take some work.

RSS

The third section on your 43 Marks home page contains RSS feeds. It is easy to add, remove and rearrange feeds to gather all your favorite feeds in one place.

There is no way of importing OPML files (for those who already have a set of RSS feeds on another service). And there is no way of organizing feeds in folders if you have a large number of feeds.

To sum it up

If you are starting out doing online research or if your interests are quite focused, 43 Marks provides a very convenient safe port for you to start your searches and collect your findings.

If you are an information professional, 43 marks is not likely to meet your needs. The search tools are not sufficiently advanced and the lack of import/export options is to limiting.