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I often find myself in the situation where I know I saw something in a web page recently, but don't remember where. I would therefore like to be able to do a full-text search of the contents of my web history in Firefox. Is there an extension that will do this?

I am aware of this question. However, I am only interested in Firefox solutions, and the only Firefox option in that question seems to no longer be relevant (add-on has changed).

My requirements for a solution to this problem:

  • Must work in Firefox.
  • Must work locally - I do not want to send my history or bookmarks to a 3rd-party service to get this functionality (so InfoAxe is out as near as I can tell).
  • Must be a high-quality, reputable extension (fuzzy, I know, but many extensions smell sketchy).
  • Must work in Linux (so Google Desktop is out so far as I know).
  • Strongly prefer open source solution.

Does anyone know of such an extension?

Community
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Michael Ekstrand
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  • Pretty much the same question, just saw: http://superuser.com/questions/277023/how-to-search-page-content-in-firefox-history-like-is-possible-in-google-chrome – Michael Ekstrand Jun 13 '11 at 16:14
  • any new stuff about this topic? fetching.io looks like its not maintained any more, and so is recallmonkey. – pvinis Oct 05 '15 at 08:48

2 Answers2

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Mozilla Labs has something called RecallNonkey that's being developed for this purpose. http://mozillalabs.com/prospector/2011/06/20/recallmonkey-finds-what-you-forget/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/prospector-recall-monkey/

This is a local search against the history entries in the places database and I don't believe it sends any information out there - it's still pretty new/experimental but I've been using it for a little while and it seems to work well.

Stephanie
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    I should add, https://github.com/mozilla/prospector/tree/master/recallMonkey - not clear what the license is from the source but I've asked for clarification. – Stephanie Jul 10 '11 at 00:08
  • https://github.com/mozilla/prospector/issues/583#issuecomment-1540712 confirms that it's under an open source license (MPL). – Stephanie Jul 10 '11 at 17:04
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    RecallMonkey does not seem to include a fulltext index of the browsing history. It rather provides a refinable search of the existing history data using a webpage UI. So no more than URLs and page titles can be searched. Unfortunately. – deepc Jun 26 '12 at 22:29
  • another way (only if when you use Firefox you are logged to Google account) is search for inside history via Google cache – Pol Hallen Jun 16 '14 at 21:26
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Use recoll desktop search along with the recollweb firefox extension. This copies visited pages to local cache that recoll indexes.

Recoll desktop search: http://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/

Firefox extension: http://recollfirefox.sourceforge.net/

Sameer
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