4 ms·

Friend of mine is always surprised when we discuss something and 20 seconds later I send him an article I once read about it. He has asked multiple times what I

Friend of mine is always surprised when we discuss something and 20 seconds later I send him an article I once read about it. He has asked multiple times what I use to store all these links. It's Google. I just use Google to find the article again based on what I remember from it. This doesn't always work though and can lead to a frustrating half hour of searching that ends in disappointment.

frereubu 4y ago
Even more frustrating when you can't quite remember the content of the article you can't find, although you're sure you found it fascinating when you read it at the time...
- Jeff_Brown 4y ago
  If I had a dollar for every topic I've read about and found fascinating and can hardly describe with any more detail than that ...
- mnsh 4y ago
  I hate it when that happens, more often that not i remember the visuals of the site, then i try to find it in my browser history like a sucker. I have yet to find a solution for this. One solution is I screenshot all the sites i visit, extract their colors, and create a searchable index. Nice side project idea I guess.
  - spc476 4y ago
    Install a web proxy (is Squid a thing anymore? It used to be the proxy server), configure your web browser(s) to use it, and have the proxy save all its content so you know where to search for a "known item search."
    - phkahler 4y ago
      Seems like a nice companion to run on a pi-hole.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jll29 4y ago
  In information retrieval, this is known as a "known item search". 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.
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    > 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?". -- [0] - Locally. I'm sure Google has it on their servers, but it's meant to help advertisers, not users.
    - sandbags 4y ago
      This. Why does my browser not keep history forever, I surely have space for it? Why doesn’t it archive every page it can? And build a full-text index of every page so that I can be reasonably sure I can lay my hands on something I’ve seen, even if the original is now gone. I can only conclude that the people working on browsers aren’t interested in what goes on in a browser.
    - SaltyFetus 4y ago
      It's a truly unbelievable state of affairs. Browsers are THE app, but I cannot even ask nicely to store my own history? 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.
  - 4y ago
klibertp 4y ago
> This doesn't always work The problem is with when it doesn't work: when it's the least convenient and the most irritating. For popular content it doesn't matter if you forget a precise word used there, you'll get to it soon enough. But for specific, niche content - which is the most valuable to me most of the time - even if you get all the keywords right you might not find what you're looking for on Google. The reasons range from the keywords being too generic to the site being no longer online and it's really frustrating when it happens. OneTab and bookmarks are not an answer because they don't save the content. I tried Joplin + Web Clipper which does, but it works on a single-tab basis, and when I have 200 tabs open sending them all to Joplin manually takes ages... and then Joplin slows down to a crawl when you're done.
therealdrag0 4y ago
I have experienced that for sure. Reminds me though I have also experienced “I swear there is a word that sounds like “bla” that means xyz” and spend 30+ min trying to find it in dictionaries and it just doesn’t exist. Funny how the mind works.
- kmote00 4y ago
  I've used this website for years, for just that purpose. Can't believe it's still up, actually. https://chir.ag/projects/tip-of-my-tongue/ https://chir.ag/projects/tip-of-my-tongue/

frereubu 4y ago

Even more frustrating when you can't quite remember the content of the article you can't find, although you're sure you found it fascinating when you read it at the time...

Jeff_Brown 4y ago
If I had a dollar for every topic I've read about and found fascinating and can hardly describe with any more detail than that ...
mnsh 4y ago
I hate it when that happens, more often that not i remember the visuals of the site, then i try to find it in my browser history like a sucker. I have yet to find a solution for this. One solution is I screenshot all the sites i visit, extract their colors, and create a searchable index. Nice side project idea I guess.
- spc476 4y ago
  Install a web proxy (is Squid a thing anymore? It used to be the proxy server), configure your web browser(s) to use it, and have the proxy save all its content so you know where to search for a "known item search."
  - phkahler 4y ago
    Seems like a nice companion to run on a pi-hole.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jll29 4y ago
In information retrieval, this is known as a "known item search". 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.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  > 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?". -- [0] - Locally. I'm sure Google has it on their servers, but it's meant to help advertisers, not users.
  - sandbags 4y ago
    This. Why does my browser not keep history forever, I surely have space for it? Why doesn’t it archive every page it can? And build a full-text index of every page so that I can be reasonably sure I can lay my hands on something I’ve seen, even if the original is now gone. I can only conclude that the people working on browsers aren’t interested in what goes on in a browser.
  - SaltyFetus 4y ago
    It's a truly unbelievable state of affairs. Browsers are THE app, but I cannot even ask nicely to store my own history? 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.
- 4y ago

klibertp 4y ago

> This doesn't always work The problem is with when it doesn't work: when it's the least convenient and the most irritating. For popular content it doesn't matter if you forget a precise word used there, you'll get to it soon enough. But for specific, niche content - which is the most valuable to me most of the time - even if you get all the keywords right you might not find what you're looking for on Google. The reasons range from the keywords being too generic to the site being no longer online and it's really frustrating when it happens. OneTab and bookmarks are not an answer because they don't save the content. I tried Joplin + Web Clipper which does, but it works on a single-tab basis, and when I have 200 tabs open sending them all to Joplin manually takes ages... and then Joplin slows down to a crawl when you're done.

therealdrag0 4y ago

I have experienced that for sure. Reminds me though I have also experienced “I swear there is a word that sounds like “bla” that means xyz” and spend 30+ min trying to find it in dictionaries and it just doesn’t exist. Funny how the mind works.

kmote00 4y ago
I've used this website for years, for just that purpose. Can't believe it's still up, actually. https://chir.ag/projects/tip-of-my-tongue/ https://chir.ag/projects/tip-of-my-tongue/