This article covers a powerful bookmarking tool that makes it easy to search browser history by webpage text, tags, and annotations. Memex is an open-source tool that you can use to bookmark webpages, annotate text on the web, and save notes. This tool is available via a browser extension that indexes your web history and bookmarks to make it fully searchable via text.
Instead of using the native browser bookmark feature, you can bookmark webpages via Memex and save with custom tags. This way, it allows you to organize websites with notes, tags, lists, and highlights. Then you can simply call the Memex search and find anything you saved or visited just by typing text. Memex also available as a native app for Android and iOS with encrypted-sync, this brings all your data across devices and makes it easy to re-find anything anywhere.
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Search Browser History by Webpage Text, Tags, Annotations
To get started with Memex, simply visit the website and grab the extension for your web browser. The extension is available for Chrome, Firefox, and Brave browser. The Chrome version will also work with other Chromium-based browsers such as Edge, Opera, etc. You can get started just by installing the extension as it stored the data locally with no necessity for an account. But, if you want to sync your data across devices than you have to create an account. The Memex extension shows you a menu with options to save and index your online activities. As you can see in the screenshot attached below, the menu basically has 3 sections with a search box at the top.
Bookmarks & Tags
The first section is for bookmarks, tags, and collections. This works on the currently active page. You can use these options to bookmark the page, assign a tag to it, add it to a collection. This is useful when you want to save the webpage.
The extension index your history in the background so that you can easily re-find anything you accessed before. The second section gives you options to exclude a webpage from the indexing. You can either ignore the current page or pause the indexing for a given time period.
You also get a sidebar on the webpage where you can quickly access all these options without opening the extension menu every time. You can enable/disable the sidebar from the third section along with the highlighter tool for annotation.
Annotations & Notes
Apart from saving webpages, you can also save text from the webpages. When you select text on any webpage, a tiny popup opens with two options, highlighter, and note. With highlighter, you can annotate the text for indexing and later referral. Whereas, with the note option, you can save the text as a note along with tags. This way, you can save specific text or sections of a webpage without bookmarking the webpage.
Search History & Bookmarks
Whenever you have to search for something, simply use the search box from the extension or use the hotkey to access the search. Then type your query there and get results from bookmarks, notes, annotation, and indexed history.
You can access all your saved data from the Memex dashboard. The dashboard shows all your collections and sorts the saved pages and notes separately. You can jump between collection to further organize your data. There is a dedicated collection for Mobile, anything you saved from the Memex mobile app appears under that collection.
Do note that, if you use Memex across devices, you have to manually sync the data from the dashboard. If you like to get your data synced automatically, you have to subscribe to a paid plan for that.
Closing Words
Memex is a powerful tool to search for bookmarks and browsers history via webpage texts, tags, and annotation. Unlike the traditional bookmarks, you don’t have to specifically remember anything to re-find something you visited. You can simply search a simple text from that webpage or website and easily find it from history or saved data. The extension packs powerful settings as well where you can define hotkeys for different functions, pick search engine of choice, customize your indexing preference, create a blocklist, and try upcoming beta features. And, if you are worried about your data privacy, you can also opt-out from sharing anonymous user statics (disabled by default) and check out the detailed list of all tracked events.
