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Comment by zaat | Hacker News Reader

While I'm preety deep in the camp of those who don't want or let google save their history, I didn't stop caring about managing my own information, I just gave up. The amount of info I'm processing today is on a different scale than it used to be on the good old days, and the tools we have - browser history for instance - just didn't scale.

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I wish we had a middle ground between browser history and favourites - just a way to preferentially find something I’ve visited and tagged before by keyword that works in the address bar. “What was the name of that one article Among hundreds from 3 months ago about X...”

One feature I've wanted since forever is a full text search engine of only stuff I've previously seen before. I've spent hours typing in various search queries for an article I'm sure I read 3 years ago but am fuzzy on the details of. Doesn't seem too hard to do technologically and would solve a real problem in my life.

The Firefox address bar doesn't let you tag things by keyword afaik, but it is pretty good at pulling up articles based on both their URL and title. It's definitely improved my ability to go back and find stuff from a few weeks or months back.

You definitely can tag bookmarks in Firefox, and typing the tag will bring up that item.

Adding a tag to bookmark: https://i.imgur.com/iVElOWb.png

Searching by tag: https://i.imgur.com/e3UmQDG.png

I don't use any bookmark management addons, so this is definitely default behaviour.

Perhaps session buddy, if you're the type to have a bunch of tabs on a topic. You can search for names of sessions, or for pages in a saved session.

Something like Pinboard?

https://pinboard.in/

Pinboard is a bookmarking solution, not a middle ground between bookmarks and browser history.

I am currently evaluating worldbrains memex for firefox. It let's you full text search your visited sites the results can also be included in a google search via the plugin. Sites can be annotated, tagged.

When I said we, I meant all of us, including developers. Economic forces had a lot to do with it, of course, but developers flocked to SaaS business models and away from traditional native apps. This is a huge loss for user control of their data.

Imagine if that hadn't happened! I think we would have amazing tools for managing our information locally, in a highly automated and intuitive way.

The seeds of these possibilities are everywhere. Search, of course, but also things like tagging and even automatic tagging with with machine learning models. Imagine if Chrome had the same tools for organizing bookmarks as Gmail has for tagging email, plus all of the power of recommendation engines under the user's control.

No, instead Google keeps bookmarks extremely underpowered because they'd rather have people search for everything all the time in order to drive traffic to their ads.

It's not just bookmarks. I didn't realize for a long time that chrome was silently deleting my browsing history. Now I bookmark anything that seems even vaguely interesting, which in turn makes my address bar suggestions less than useful.

The tools that were developed in the interim were designed not to scale.

Giving up is the same thing as stopped caring!

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