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> I've wasted many an hour combing through Google and my search history to look up a good article, blog post, or just something I've seen before. This is the f

> I've wasted many an hour combing through Google and my search history to look up a good article, blog post, or just something I've seen before. This is the fault of web browser vendors who have yet to give a damn about book marks. > Apollo is a search engine and web crawler to digest your digital footprint. What this means is that you choose what to put in it. When you come across something that looks interesting, be it an article, blog post, website, whatever, you manually add it (with built in systems to make doing so easy). So it's a searchable database for bookmarks then. > The first thing you might notice is that the design is reminiscent of the old digital computer age, back in the Unix days. This is intentional for many reasons. In addition to paying homage to the greats of the past, this design makes me feel like I'm searching through something that is authentically my own. When I search for stuff, I genuinely feel like I'm travelling through the past. This does not make any sense. It's Unix-like because it feels old? It seems like the author thoroughly misses the point of unix philosophy.

chris_st 5y ago
> So it's a searchable database for bookmarks then. It appears to be that, but it appears also to pull out the content of the web page and index that too, so you can (presumably) find stuff that isn't in the "pure" bookmark, which I think of as a link with maybe a title.
- nextaccountic 5y ago
  I think browsers should download a full copy of each bookmark (so you can still see it when they are taken down) and make it fully searchable. Actually, I've been trying to find Firefox extensions that give a better interface to bookmarks and there doesn't seem to be one. It's like, people don't use bookmarks anymore and accept that it might as well not exist, and use something else. It's telling that Firefox has two bookmark systems built-in (pocket and regular bookmarks) and they aren't integrated with each other; I suppose that people that use pocket never think about regular bookmarks. edit: but my pet peeve is that it isn't easy to search history for something I saw 10 days ago but I don't remember the exact keywords to search.
  - phildenhoff 5y ago
    The difference, to me, about Pocket is that I use it specifically as a to-read list. My list is just "sites I want to visit/read/watch later", whereas bookmarks are more of "I want to go here regularly". Also, all the bookmark systems I've ever used treat links as files that can only be in one folder, whereas Pocket at least has tags so links can associate with multiple topics.
    - forgotpwd16 5y ago
      >at least has tags so links can associate with multiple topics This has applied since ever to regular bookmarks as well. Basically you can just throw everything in unsorted and use tags only.
    - cassepipe 5y ago
      Firefox has bookmark tags
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - forgotpwd16 5y ago
    >I think browsers should download a full copy of each bookmark [...] and make it fully searchable. This, outside a browser, could be implemented as a server/client self-hosted solution with a back-end taking care of downloading/searching and an extension acting as client. Maybe it could even be made entirely as extension?
    - berkes 5y ago
      That would miss all the personalized content, all the content behind authorization and so on. At the very least, it would need to be able to get the content pushed to it by the client, the way the client has it at moment of bookmarking, making the download/scraping kindof superflous. Indexing and doing search, however, is hard, but solved. Hard in the sense that it is not something a firefox addon could do very well. I presume a (self)hosted meilisearch would suffice, though.
- j1elo 5y ago
  An eternity ago I used a fantastic Firefox extension named "ScrapBook", which was like having your own internet archive: instead of just bookmarking a site, the extension would scrap and download the whole contents (or just sections) from the page you were visiting. Its website seems to still be up to this day! http://www.xuldev.org/scrapbook/ http://www.xuldev.org/scrapbook/ This extension didn't survive the days of breaking API compatibility that Firefox went through (sigh). However, seems like some replicas exist that aim to provide the same or similar functionality, such as ScrapBee https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/scrapbee/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/scrapbee/
  - jhoechtl 5y ago
    Zotero, while a full-fledged citation software, can download whole web pages and provides full text search in this archive. Provides a Firefox plugin, saving pages is just a click away https://www.zotero.org/download/ https://www.zotero.org/download/
    - j1elo 5y ago
      Wow that's amazing, I had seen Zotero mentioned in other 4 comments but still hadn't yet triggered me to do a search for it. Seems like a great way to create a personal archive! Will be checking it out, thanks
- msravi 5y ago
  I use nb https://github.com/xwmx/nb https://github.com/xwmx/nb for both bookmarks and notetaking. nb <link> downloads a copy of the link and stores it along with the bookmark. All notes (and consequently bookmarks and their contents) are stored as plain-text markdown files - so there's no dependency on a proprietary format, and all the content becomes searchable. If you're a vim-user, you can also get the notational-fzf-vim plugin (https://github.com/alok/notational-fzf-vim https://github.com/alok/notational-fzf-vim) and point it to the notes/bookmarks folder, and have full fuzzy search over all the content.
stevekemp 5y ago
I've been thinking recently it might be interesting/useful to write a simple SOCKS proxy which could be used by my browser. The SOCKS proxy would not just fetch the content of the page(s) requested, but would also dump them to ~/Archive/$year/$month/$day/$domain/$id.html. Of course I'd only want to archive text/plain and text/html, but it seems like it should be a simple thing to write and might be useful. Searching would be a simple matter of grep..
- habibur 5y ago
  Did that. But then you will find your disk quickly getting filled up with GBs of cached contents that you rarely search within. Rather when you need that same content, you will find yourself going to google, searching that and the page is instantly there unless removed. There's a reason why bookmarks aren't as popular as it had been. People now use google + keywords instead of bookmarks.
  - berkes 5y ago
    It would also miss all the pages that are built from ajax-requests on the client side. Which, nowadays, is a large amount. The client is the one assembling all the content into the thing you read and so it is the most likely candidate to offer the copy that you want indexed.
  - kbenson 5y ago
    Maybe archive.org should run a subscription service where for a few bucks a month, you can request your page visits be archived (in a timely manner and with some level of assurance) and leverage their system for tracking content over time. That, in conjunction with something like Google, might actually give fairly good assurance that what you're searching for actually exists in a state like you saw it, while also leveraging that 30 people accessing this blog today that use the service don't use significantly more resources to store the data, and also helps archive.org fulfill its mission.
ryandrake 5y ago
> This does not make any sense. It's Unix-like because it feels old? It seems like the author thoroughly misses the point of unix philosophy. Yea, I couldn't figure out what makes it Unix-like, either. I mean, which UNIX in particular? Solaris? AIX? HP-UX? Do you use UNIX commands to navigate it? Is there a shell or something? Kind of odd way to describe it.
- chillpenguin 5y ago
  Usually when someone says something is unix-like, they mean it "embraces unix philosophy", which usually means something like it operates on stdin/stdout so it can be composed in a pipeline on the shell. Which is why I was mislead in this case :)
  - jonathankoren 5y ago
    Not just stdin and stdout, but lots of little tools that can be strung together in unique ways. Also text files rather than binary files for storage.
    - Aeolun 5y ago
      One tool per thing you want to do
chillpenguin 5y ago
Agree with the unix bit. I was expecting something "unix philosophy" but it turns out they just meant it looks retro.
- jll29 5y ago
  "looks (intentionally) retro" like Serenity OS.
  - amirGi 5y ago
    OP here, yes that's exactly what I meant by unix! Just the design, not the functionality :)
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
"It seems like the author thoroughly misses the point of the unix philosophy." Almost as if "unix philosophy" might mean different things to different people. "The first thing you might notice ..." First thing I notice is this project is 100% tied to Google, what with Chrome and Go (even for SNOBOL pattern matching, sheesh). "... this design makes me feel like I'm searching through something that is authentically my own." Except it isn't. It shuns the use of freely available, open-source UNIX-like projects in favor of software belonging to a company that Hoovers up personal data and sells online ad services. Enjoy the illusion. :) Life can be very comfortable inside the gilded cage.1 The Talosians will take good care of you.2 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_cage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_cage 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talosians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talosians
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jhoechtl 5y ago
> This is the fault of web browser vendors who have yet to give a damn about book marks. Firefox actually has a very powerful and capable bookmark system, see https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplete-firefox#w_changing-results-on-the-fly https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplet...
- Arech 5y ago
  Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with the main issue - how to recall the info you've seen weeks ago? It features no search over the internal content of bookmarks (and possibly pages few clicks away from a bookmark) but that's a main thing that is necessary for solving the issue
- rhizome 5y ago
  Funny you should call out autocomplete, which is not powerful nor capable enough to let me change the order of how things appear. IIRC the default is 1. bookmarks, 2. history, 3. open tabs, 4. websearch suggestions, and last I checked (a few months ago) this can't be changed.

chris_st 5y ago

> So it's a searchable database for bookmarks then. It appears to be that, but it appears also to pull out the content of the web page and index that too, so you can (presumably) find stuff that isn't in the "pure" bookmark, which I think of as a link with maybe a title.

nextaccountic 5y ago
I think browsers should download a full copy of each bookmark (so you can still see it when they are taken down) and make it fully searchable. Actually, I've been trying to find Firefox extensions that give a better interface to bookmarks and there doesn't seem to be one. It's like, people don't use bookmarks anymore and accept that it might as well not exist, and use something else. It's telling that Firefox has two bookmark systems built-in (pocket and regular bookmarks) and they aren't integrated with each other; I suppose that people that use pocket never think about regular bookmarks. edit: but my pet peeve is that it isn't easy to search history for something I saw 10 days ago but I don't remember the exact keywords to search.
- phildenhoff 5y ago
  The difference, to me, about Pocket is that I use it specifically as a to-read list. My list is just "sites I want to visit/read/watch later", whereas bookmarks are more of "I want to go here regularly". Also, all the bookmark systems I've ever used treat links as files that can only be in one folder, whereas Pocket at least has tags so links can associate with multiple topics.
  - forgotpwd16 5y ago
    >at least has tags so links can associate with multiple topics This has applied since ever to regular bookmarks as well. Basically you can just throw everything in unsorted and use tags only.
  - cassepipe 5y ago
    Firefox has bookmark tags
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- forgotpwd16 5y ago
  >I think browsers should download a full copy of each bookmark [...] and make it fully searchable. This, outside a browser, could be implemented as a server/client self-hosted solution with a back-end taking care of downloading/searching and an extension acting as client. Maybe it could even be made entirely as extension?
  - berkes 5y ago
    That would miss all the personalized content, all the content behind authorization and so on. At the very least, it would need to be able to get the content pushed to it by the client, the way the client has it at moment of bookmarking, making the download/scraping kindof superflous. Indexing and doing search, however, is hard, but solved. Hard in the sense that it is not something a firefox addon could do very well. I presume a (self)hosted meilisearch would suffice, though.
j1elo 5y ago
An eternity ago I used a fantastic Firefox extension named "ScrapBook", which was like having your own internet archive: instead of just bookmarking a site, the extension would scrap and download the whole contents (or just sections) from the page you were visiting. Its website seems to still be up to this day! http://www.xuldev.org/scrapbook/ http://www.xuldev.org/scrapbook/ This extension didn't survive the days of breaking API compatibility that Firefox went through (sigh). However, seems like some replicas exist that aim to provide the same or similar functionality, such as ScrapBee https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/scrapbee/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/scrapbee/
- jhoechtl 5y ago
  Zotero, while a full-fledged citation software, can download whole web pages and provides full text search in this archive. Provides a Firefox plugin, saving pages is just a click away https://www.zotero.org/download/ https://www.zotero.org/download/
  - j1elo 5y ago
    Wow that's amazing, I had seen Zotero mentioned in other 4 comments but still hadn't yet triggered me to do a search for it. Seems like a great way to create a personal archive! Will be checking it out, thanks
msravi 5y ago
I use nb https://github.com/xwmx/nb https://github.com/xwmx/nb for both bookmarks and notetaking. nb <link> downloads a copy of the link and stores it along with the bookmark. All notes (and consequently bookmarks and their contents) are stored as plain-text markdown files - so there's no dependency on a proprietary format, and all the content becomes searchable. If you're a vim-user, you can also get the notational-fzf-vim plugin (https://github.com/alok/notational-fzf-vim https://github.com/alok/notational-fzf-vim) and point it to the notes/bookmarks folder, and have full fuzzy search over all the content.

stevekemp 5y ago

I've been thinking recently it might be interesting/useful to write a simple SOCKS proxy which could be used by my browser. The SOCKS proxy would not just fetch the content of the page(s) requested, but would also dump them to ~/Archive/$year/$month/$day/$domain/$id.html. Of course I'd only want to archive text/plain and text/html, but it seems like it should be a simple thing to write and might be useful. Searching would be a simple matter of grep..

habibur 5y ago
Did that. But then you will find your disk quickly getting filled up with GBs of cached contents that you rarely search within. Rather when you need that same content, you will find yourself going to google, searching that and the page is instantly there unless removed. There's a reason why bookmarks aren't as popular as it had been. People now use google + keywords instead of bookmarks.
- berkes 5y ago
  It would also miss all the pages that are built from ajax-requests on the client side. Which, nowadays, is a large amount. The client is the one assembling all the content into the thing you read and so it is the most likely candidate to offer the copy that you want indexed.
- kbenson 5y ago
  Maybe archive.org should run a subscription service where for a few bucks a month, you can request your page visits be archived (in a timely manner and with some level of assurance) and leverage their system for tracking content over time. That, in conjunction with something like Google, might actually give fairly good assurance that what you're searching for actually exists in a state like you saw it, while also leveraging that 30 people accessing this blog today that use the service don't use significantly more resources to store the data, and also helps archive.org fulfill its mission.

ryandrake 5y ago

> This does not make any sense. It's Unix-like because it feels old? It seems like the author thoroughly misses the point of unix philosophy. Yea, I couldn't figure out what makes it Unix-like, either. I mean, which UNIX in particular? Solaris? AIX? HP-UX? Do you use UNIX commands to navigate it? Is there a shell or something? Kind of odd way to describe it.

chillpenguin 5y ago
Usually when someone says something is unix-like, they mean it "embraces unix philosophy", which usually means something like it operates on stdin/stdout so it can be composed in a pipeline on the shell. Which is why I was mislead in this case :)
- jonathankoren 5y ago
  Not just stdin and stdout, but lots of little tools that can be strung together in unique ways. Also text files rather than binary files for storage.
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    One tool per thing you want to do

chillpenguin 5y ago

Agree with the unix bit. I was expecting something "unix philosophy" but it turns out they just meant it looks retro.

jll29 5y ago
"looks (intentionally) retro" like Serenity OS.
- amirGi 5y ago
  OP here, yes that's exactly what I meant by unix! Just the design, not the functionality :)

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

"It seems like the author thoroughly misses the point of the unix philosophy." Almost as if "unix philosophy" might mean different things to different people. "The first thing you might notice ..." First thing I notice is this project is 100% tied to Google, what with Chrome and Go (even for SNOBOL pattern matching, sheesh). "... this design makes me feel like I'm searching through something that is authentically my own." Except it isn't. It shuns the use of freely available, open-source UNIX-like projects in favor of software belonging to a company that Hoovers up personal data and sells online ad services. Enjoy the illusion. :) Life can be very comfortable inside the gilded cage.1 The Talosians will take good care of you.2 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_cage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_cage 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talosians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talosians

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jhoechtl 5y ago

> This is the fault of web browser vendors who have yet to give a damn about book marks. Firefox actually has a very powerful and capable bookmark system, see https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplete-firefox#w_changing-results-on-the-fly https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplet...

Arech 5y ago
Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with the main issue - how to recall the info you've seen weeks ago? It features no search over the internal content of bookmarks (and possibly pages few clicks away from a bookmark) but that's a main thing that is necessary for solving the issue
rhizome 5y ago
Funny you should call out autocomplete, which is not powerful nor capable enough to let me change the order of how things appear. IIRC the default is 1. bookmarks, 2. history, 3. open tabs, 4. websearch suggestions, and last I checked (a few months ago) this can't be changed.