Sue Dumais from Microsoft Research and her team wrote a seminal paper on this entitled "Stuff I've Seen".
It is surprising that modern browsers innovate so little - for example they do not have a mode that searches only URLs you have previously visited, which would obviously massively help with known item search.
What's worse, they don't have a useful list of those URLs anyway[0], not anymore - both Chrome and Firefox have some ridiculously short and (AFAIK) not configurable window of browsing history. At this point they could do away with the history tab completely, as it's perfectly calibrated to be useless: the links are dropped just as they cross the threshold between "likely still have it open in a tab" and "what was that thing I saw the other day?".
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[0] - Locally. I'm sure Google has it on their servers, but it's meant to help advertisers, not users.
I so badly want an extension to store all my phone and computer browser history, just URLs and Page Titles for all time so I can search it. How does this not exist? Much less be built in... Page text would be even better, but all I know that have attempted this have failed.
Allows you to search your history or bookmarks by page content, not just title.