muesli

At some point in history we collectively gave up on bookmarks and just resorted to piling up hundreds of tabs in our browser windows.

I still fancy the idea of a locally running and private search engine, that tracks everything I do on the web, so I can search my browsing history and easily rediscover things I've read months or years ago.

Mar 3, 2022 at 8:10amWeb
Show thread🏴‍☠️ ₱ɎⱤ₳₮Ɇ฿Ɇ₳ⱤĐMar 3, 2022
@fribbledom i like that idea. i went back to using bookmarks, a personal search engine would be really handy
Show threadAdrian HeineMar 3, 2022
@fribbledom I have a text file in which I list most things I read with a short comment but yeah
Show threadAverage AdminMar 3, 2022
@fribbledom I just bookmark tons of sites just to never look at them again. Same with tabs, I have like 70 different tabs open on my tablet, half of which I haven't looked in at least 6 months.
Show threadmuesliMar 3, 2022

@messs55

Yeah, it's just not manageable.

Show threadAverage AdminMar 3, 2022
@fribbledom I feel like I need some solution that I can organize properly and can use everywhere. At this point I have a mess of links and notes on like 5 different devices in different apps and places and formats
Show threadErtainMar 3, 2022
@messs55 I use my Nextcloud instance to save all my notes and bookmarks. I can easily synchronize my notes with my computer at home.
Show threadAverage AdminMar 3, 2022
@Ertain the nextcloud bookmarks app does seem pretty powerful and multi-plattform, could be a good fit for me, I'm just a bit reluctant to get into nextcloud as an ecosystem
Show threadTrit’Mar 3, 2022
@fribbledom Did you try Vivaldi? It has a very complete history function, vith calendar and search engine. You can set it to keep track of your visited webpages between “clear at closing” and “Forever”.
Show threadkeithzgMar 3, 2022
@fribbledom I desperately wish there was a browser whose mobile version had a built-in bookmarking interface that wasn't entirely unusable if you try and sort things into folders, that's what personally made me largely give up on bookmarks. Although I still do frequently bookmark things in the vain hope that that'll make them surfaced in the in-browser search quick results.
Show threadAnnika BackstromMar 3, 2022
@fribbledom This resonates with me. The Firefox bar is pretty good at pulling what I want from history, and I do use Pinboard pretty faithfully. But it's requires a lot of conscious effort. See a cool thing, actively realise I liked it and may want to find it later, and put it in Pinboard with tags that may help my future self. It's a little tedious.
Show threadAsimechMar 3, 2022
@fribbledom I moved away from "save mega session" some years back.
Now I do a mix of text files, bookmarks and embracing the fleeting nature of all knowledge before the onslaught of entropy.
Show threadmariusMar 3, 2022

@fribbledom you'd probably have loved the original ideas of Nepomuk, KDE's semantic desktop framework:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEPOMUK_(software)

NEPOMUK (software) - Wikipedia

Show threadmuesliMar 3, 2022

@mariusor

I was a part of this, but frankly I never liked the design or implementation.

Show threadmariusMar 3, 2022
@fribbledom I remember that the integration between the of-the-shelf parts responsible with building and storing the graph and KDE software weren't great. I was just a user at that time and the benefits weren't really visible. :(
Show threadDigital Mark λ ☕️ 🌮 🚀 🌗Mar 3, 2022
@fribbledom I still organize my stuff by bookmarks, tho a lot of it is "oh shit this window's full, bookmark all tabs and I'll deal with them later" (sometimes I even do). 7321 entries currently.
Show threadBob Mottram :debian:Mar 3, 2022
@fribbledom We didn't collectively give up. The small number of people who develop web browsers refused to make good UIs for bookmarks.

The bookmarks UI in firefox is awful, and that's why I don't use it often. There has been zero innovation in the UI of bookmarks since Netscape in the 1990s.
Show threadFitheachMar 3, 2022
@bob
I don't think there has ever been a good UI for browser bookmarks. The one Firefox uses now, is probably no different in design to the Netscape original. At least, that is how I remember it.
Show threadafMar 3, 2022
@fribbledom Doesn’t Firefox do that? That’s how I’ve used it for years, might have to disable search suggestions now.
Show threadmuesliMar 3, 2022

@af

It tracks your history and searches, but I'm actually thinking of indexing the actual content of the pages you visit.

Show threadafMar 3, 2022
@fribbledom Oooh yes sorry
Show threaduvok cheetah 🇩🇪Mar 3, 2022
@fribbledom actually, my Firefox bookmark bar is my "read it later" list
Show threadMovedSinyxMar 3, 2022
wot @fribbledom no i don’t bookmark as a habit but only lunatix open hundreds of tabs (or gnome developers, i heard their machines have loads of ram). most of the times i rely on history
Show threadblitzMar 3, 2022
@fribbledom i use zotero to capture web pages and pdfs. that makes them also more easily searchable than bookmarks
Show threadlinusMar 3, 2022
😃I had the same Idea. I thaught it would be cool to add comments and annotations, like https://dokie.li/ and https://web.hypothes.is/
I am also thinking about a privacy preserving way of sharing this data (annotations + indexed, archived versions of the site) with coworkers / friends or everybody. To make an decentralized alternative / addition to centralized search engines. But thats more difficult /complex and would not be the first goal.
dokieli

Show threadErtainMar 3, 2022
@fribbledom I have a few bookmarks in some browsers. But most of my bookmarks are saved to my Nextcloud instance.
Show threadJoachim (he/him, white)Mar 3, 2022

@fribbledom

Oh, that would be awsome! Yes, I often whished for something like that!

Show threadAlvaroMar 3, 2022
@fribbledom Agree. Could be really nice. Something like this: https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/bookmarks but with history and related with tabs.
Show threadPatashu (Dragon Style!)Mar 3, 2022

@fribbledom @TerrorBite

I basically low-tech emulate having a search engine for everything I've looked at by keeping track of and tagging anything I'm interested in in a notepad++ document

Show threadBen ZaninMar 3, 2022

@fribbledom I strongly suspect that one of the benefits of keeping a huge herd of free-range tabs is that it lets typing in the address bar function as a sort of search function over them.

If I could dedicate a couple of gigs of local storage to a cache of page contents, with keyword indexing for rapid searching, plus maybe a bit of "you last visited this page on these dates from these referrer links"... man, that would be amazingly useful.

Show threaddarkskysblueMar 3, 2022
@fribbledom you know, I collect tabs. Then realize I don't need them but might want to come back so I send the link to a Pocket void, close the tab, and never go back
Show threadRiedlerMar 3, 2022
@fribbledom I still use them… no idea how other people keep their stuff organized without bookmarks.
The folders contain bookmarks. I also use a combination of tabs and windows to keep categories of tabs together. Very nice imo.
Show threadFrost [moved]Mar 3, 2022
@fribbledom We've actually been getting a lot of use out of Firefox's bookmark tags!
Show threadBrent AndersonMar 3, 2022
@fribbledom This project from Linus Lee is a personal search engine just like you're describing. Very much worth the read: https://thesephist.com/posts/monocle/
Building Monocle, a universal personal search engine for life | thesephist.com

Show threadMaxMar 3, 2022

@fribbledom Something just about no one actually used but showed so much promise was Windows Timeline. It mostly only worked with Edge Classic and Office apps (kind of), but it was a searchable timeline of documents and browser tabs syncable between (Windows) devices.

So many good ideas, and they had even more that didn’t get released like trying to “cluster” events such as browser tabs that were research for a Word doc.

It died though, despite good ideas.

Show threadJasper 🍉Mar 3, 2022

@fribbledom i got a ton of bookmarks, but don't really go back to them so much?

Like i do find them typing in the address bar, so also, i _do_ go back to some of them. But largely they are indeed lost, continuing the pattern of feeling "closed bookmark"=lost

I have the same feeling.. Also feel like maybe should mirror more stuff locally too, just in case. Saving just-the-text is a snooze for my disk. (hell even with reduced pictures it shouldn't even rack up that fast)

Show threadberkes 🐝 🚐 🏄 🌱Mar 3, 2022
@fribbledom The tech for this is accessible today. E.g. meilisearch with an agent pushing to it. Or even simpler, inlined indexers such as probly-search. Both are from rust ecosystem. I'm certain go has similar projects.
Show threaddonutage (Bill Cole)Mar 3, 2022
@fribbledom I still use bookmarks—and on my desktop, have LaunchBar shortcuts to open the most frequently used of them—as well as a pinboard.in account for archiving interesting things I’m not necessarily going to come back to but that I don’t want to lose entirely. I’m not a big tab-user.
Show threadmoparisthebestMar 4, 2022
@fribbledom I'm using https://archivebox.io/ with quite a bit of success in closing tabs but not feeling like I'm losing anything
ArchiveBox

The open-source self-hosted web archive

Show threadlil5  🚲 🇳🇱Mar 4, 2022
@fribbledom #xbrowsersync has been my way of keeping a structured bookmark collection throughout the years, including multiple browser & device changes
Show threadpsyminMar 4, 2022
With a cronjob you can have your browsing history archived locally daily https://archivebox.io/

https://docs.archivebox.io/en/latest/Scheduled-Archiving.html
ArchiveBox

The open-source self-hosted web archive

Show threadfluxxMar 5, 2022
@fribbledom Actually, Firefox' address bar comes pretty close to this (searching only for urls and page titles in browser history but this is extremely useful already)
Show threadClaudius (legacy account)Mar 5, 2022
@fluxx @fribbledom I case you don't already know and/or use them: there are a couple of GREAT modifiers for the addresse bar:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplete-firefox#w_changing-results-on-the-fly
Address bar autocomplete suggestions in Firefox | Firefox Help

When you type into the address bar, Firefox suggests pages you've bookmarked, tagged, visited before or have open in tabs. Learn more.