Hacker News Reader

Comment by haunter | Hacker News Reader

My main problem with bookmarks that I forget about them. I don't need a bookmark keeping service, I need one which would bring them forward when I look for something, based on context too. Something like which also makes a plain text searchable snapshot of the page? Maybe LLMs can solve that.

View on HN

You're nearly there my friend: bookmarks should be centered around content and not around links.[1]

I've written a lot about this, and I got so annoyed with bookmarking and highlighting services getting it so frustratingly wrong[2] that I wrote my own solution from the ground up in 2020[3], and I have never looked back to Pinboard, Instapaper or Readwise.

It's honestly not that hard once you get the mental model and if you aren't interested in using a service you can easily build something that suits your own needs over a few weekends.

[1]: Links are definitely important metadata though!

[2]: https://lgug2z.com/articles/the-bookmarking-data-model-is-wr...

[3]: https://notado.app

I solve this by saving links in Org Roam with links to other notes for related topics. Then when I want to find things, I can look at the backlinks for some topic note.

There are lots of similar tools that also support this flow; basically anything that supports note backlinks (Obsidian, Joplin, Logseq, etc.). I don't ever really use browser bookmarks, because I never found myself actually doing anything but saving links (I never referred to them later). I actually find and navigate to links I save in my notes all the time though.

I built a tool, https://showboard.ca, that does most of what you're looking for.

It helps visualize and organize bookmarks into boards, which you can then share with others. It also scrapes the contents of the links, which is then searchable.

You can see an example of it in action here:

- https://showboard.ca/boards/67-engineering-leadership

- https://showboard.ca/boards/15-recipes

Maybe this can help?

Same problem here. I have thousands of bookmarks and have no quick way to find out what I have. The bookmarks just get lost in the nested folders. I built a browser extension for myself to show all the bookmarks on one page, making it easy to access them and to search them. I called it One Page Favorites. Basically all my bookmarks/favorites on one page.

Edit: Also it’s the first time for me to try to do an extension for all three browsers at the same time, Chrome, Edge, and Firefox.

Betula bookmarks can be tagged, so to the extend you can add relevant tags, you should be able to find bookmarks you are looking for.

I had the same problem for my bookmarks, but I (kinda) answered it using 2 ways: Random link (when you don't know what to search but want to visit a (curated) cool link), and search (search in title, link, tags, description).

On the paper it works great, if only you can tags those links and write a comprehensive description using keywords you'll remember. But in real life, it's something like this: https://links.l3m.in/en/ and the search barely work (because no tags nor description is not helping).

The project seems cool btw!

I do something similar with interactive fuzzy search (CLI), and the search experience is quite good for me, even with limited tagging. Links contain a lot a useful information...

Yeah, if the search is not about something too niche I can find results using the search feature of my share links instance.

Here's a recent example; I searched for "search engine", and found the article I wanted to share ("A look at search engines with their own indexes" by seirdy).

Thanks! My main need is to recall all the relevant browsing information when needed. I have hundreds of tabs opened and thousands of bookmarks. Sometimes I vaguely remember visiting a site in the past but don't recall the exact website and it wasn't bookmarked. So I went full force with feature creep (why not) and put all the open tabs, bookmarks, and visit history on one page. Seeing the full list in front of me makes it easier to browse and search.

Edit: By request, here're the links to the extensions.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/one-page-favorites/...

https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/one-page-f...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/one-page-favo...

this is literally why i invented tagging

Tags are good. Does the browsers have a standard way to access them? I know Firefox has something. Not sure about Chrome/Edge/Safari. I know some people just annotate the title with tags during bookmarking, like [tag1 tag2]. Searching would definitely hit on those.

https://mymind.com/ is based on AI analysis of page content, or something like that. I've never been able to use their product because they require a Google or Apple account.

https://raindrop.io/ apparently also has full-text search for page contents as a paid feature. I'm on the free tier and haven't tried it either.

My main problem is similar:

- I want tags in my bookmarks.

- Firefox no logger supports tagged bookmarks.

- -> I need to use a third-party service (Raindrop) for bookmarking.

- Common web searches in the Firefox address bar do not search my bookmarks at the same time, as they would normally. I need to directly use Raindrop to search specifically from my bookmarks.

- -> I might save useful things but forget about them entirely, and end up searching for them again.

> - Firefox no logger supports tagged bookmarks.

How so? You can still set tags on bookmarks, and those tags get matched by text you type in the address bar to determine what bookmarks to show you.

> Common web searches in the Firefox address bar do not search my bookmarks at the same time, as they would normally.

Yeah, that's something I would love Firefox to add: a local search index for full-content search of every page in my bookmarks and history, based on my cache.

Oh, I'm sorry, I mixed it up. Firefox no longer supports bookmarks with descriptions, which I would also like to have. Firefox on desktop has tags, but the mobile version doesn't.

A friend is building service called memxi that scrapes thr page you bookmark and then gives u a rag like way to look up things later with LLM fuzzy search

I self host wallabag and use the wallabagger extension on my machines. Works well and doesn't cost me anything on top of what I already have.

I'd the same problem and thinking a little bit, maybe a browser extension integrated with LLMs and services like betula?

Yeah, I feel like what I really want is something like this, but also it saves the whole page and indexes it and that's the first set of results when I type into my address bar. Ideally self-host-able. I kinda enjoy organizing my bookmarks at times, but I mostly do that so I can find things... which I remember from content, not my organization, so I know it's mostly pointless to organize (for me).

You can get some of that in various combinations, but I haven't seen all of it.

See my comment above, but maybe this tool, https://showboard.ca, that does most of what you're looking for. Except the address bar auto-complete, that would be next level.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com