"Toss Everything in One Box and Search Later"

Who is Mike and what drives him?

“I’m not big on tags,”. Mike says with a laugh. “I’d rather have a single ‘box’ where all my articles and PDFs live, then use a search or AI to dig up what I need.” He researches medical studies on the human eye, writing short blog posts every day based on new ophthalmology and optometry articles. “I open PubMed, find the latest releases, highlight the snippets that matter—then I reference those highlights when I’m writing.”

He also prepares continuing education lectures. “That’s another layer of research, because I need a quick way to pull older articles when I’m prepping a talk.” Mike has tried various bookmarking tools and browsers. “Fabric is just a repository, and ARC wasn’t quite what I wanted,” he says. “Surf, though, has these contexts that let me mix PDFs, web pages, and my own notes in one place. It’s exactly how I like to organize: toss everything in there and let me search it later.”

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For his daily posts, Mike skims about five articles each day. “I open each tab, grab interesting quotes, and write my snippet for the blog. It’s a lot of copy-and-paste,” he explains. “I’d love fewer steps if Surf can pull everything into a single note. That would streamline my workflow.”

Lecturing can be intense. “A two-hour talk might need thirty hours of research,” he says with a shrug, “but I enjoy it.” He likes Surf’s direction. “If I could set Kagi as my default search tomorrow, I’d switch full-time. A mobile companion would seal the deal. For now, I’m still on Vivaldi for routine stuff—but I keep coming back to Surf for the rest.”