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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

My issue with all bookmark managers, including the one I currently use (Larder.io), is re-discoverability. I will happily bookmark this and that, but it's unlikely I'll ever actually go back to the bookmark. Every once in a while I'll go through the library when I feel like looking for random gems, but the first port of call when trying to solve a problem will always be a search engine.

I wish a non-Google search engine would offer a bookmark manager that integrates into its everyday search, giving preferential treatment to previously-bookmarked material. That would be the be-all end-all of bookmark managers.

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Exactly! That led me to develop an extension for quick bookmark capture into plaintext: https://beepb00p.xyz/grasp.html It makes it way easier to search and organise bookmarks, keep some context, etc.

I also describe my search setup here: https://beepb00p.xyz/pkm-search.html#other . Basically, I can search in all of my stuff with a single hotkey, whether it's pinboard, instapaper or just plaintext bookmarks.

What about a bookmark manager or solution that preserves your privacy. A specific list of bookmarks not only has an extreme degree of uniqueness, it's content (links) are highly revealing about the interests, problems and so forth of any one person. This then tied to someone's IP address is what makes me wonder what solutions exist that let you keep all of that private while being able to sort, save and transfer your bookmarks.

>I will happily bookmark this and that, but it's unlikely I'll ever actually go back to the bookmark.

That might be a problem with your process, not with your tools.

>I wish a non-Google search engine would offer a bookmark manager that integrates into its everyday search, giving preferential treatment to previously-bookmarked material.

Most browsers already do that with local bookmarks, to a degree. (they don't search the article contents, only the bookmark tags and titles).

> Most browsers already do that with local bookmarks, to a degree. (they don't search the article contents, only the bookmark tags and titles).

That’s a pretty big problem- the specific term I remember is rarely in the title or URL. Not to mention all the times I’ve returned to the same bookmark only to see the content have been deleted or the domain expired. Default bookmark managers in browsers are complete rubbish.

It seems to me like you want an offline cache. How can something local deal with searching the content of a possibly deleted page?

Local cache would definitely be the (easiest) way of solving it. Tools like Memex [0] are most of the way there.

But a text-only copy on my local device isn't great if the content had special formatting in presentation. Also, it misses out on images or embedded videos. That's where something like ArchiveBox [1] comes in.

> ArchiveBox takes a list of website URLs you want to archive, and creates a local, static, browsable HTML clone of the content from those websites (it saves HTML, JS, media files, PDFs, images and more).

But really what I'd like to see at some point is an opt-in community tool where every page I visit that fits a certain criteria (URL, topic, special mark by me, etc) is fully cloned and uploaded to IPFS [2] for anyone interested in that topic to find and use later - regardless of what happens to the source content. Definitely a host of legal issues around this, but not impossible.

0 - https://worldbrain.io/

1 - https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox

2 - https://ipfs.io/

>>I will happily bookmark this and that, but it's unlikely I'll ever actually go back to the bookmark.

>That might be a problem with your process, not with your tools.

Sure, great startups make problems your problems. Haha.

> That might be a problem with your process, not with your tools.

"You're holding it wrong" is rarely a valid critique.

My process accumulates knowledge; the problem is that this knowledge is saved by bookmark managers as a set of dumb pointers. There must be a way to surface them, at a later date, in circumstances where I'm searching for the knowledge behind those pointers, rather than for the pointers themselves.

> Most browsers already do that with local bookmarks, to a degree.

The current stuff is just basic pattern matching. A real search engine would obviously work at a very different level.

I don't think it's a problem that browsers can solve alone, it's a feature that search engines should offer and currently don't (the only one I know that used to have a bookmark manager was Google, but I don't use it and I don't even know if it still has such a service). Or maybe bookmark managers should be smart enough to offer search capabilities so good that I can use them as the point of call for search (e.g. when I search among my bookmarks, as well as searching the actual pages behind those bookmarks, transparently integrate real search-engine results rather than saying "0 found").

Vimium sort of does this. If you press O and input a term, you get results from your history, but if you don't select any, it will google this term. You can also press B, which searches bookmarks specifically, and again if it doesn't find anything, it will search the term on Google. Also I find this B often gives better results than Google's address bar autocompletion.

It's a pretty big shift from browsers like Chrome and Firefox, but I really like how Qutebrowser handles bookmarks (and "quickmarks"). It's very similar to what you're describing.

Could you elaborate on that? Do you mainly mean how bookmarks completion is integrated into :open?

The reason I'm asking is that there are plans for some significant changes on how bookmarks/quickmarks are stored and handled: https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/pull/3855

> I wish a non-Google search engine would offer a bookmark manager that integrates into its everyday search

Isn't this the purpose of Awesome/Omni bars: to integrate local, browser, and web results?

It does it very roughly, only matching on titles and urls, not on actual content.

I think Safari has good bookmark integration; I frequently re-find bookmarks and items in my reading list just from the title. Of course searching the content as well would be a great feature.

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