Full text Search of browser history, through the browser

Question

Is there a browser that supports searching through the full text of the history pages' content ? Chrome and Firefox supports only searching the titles and URLs (with their omnibars).

I'm aware that Google Desktop and the likes are capable of doing that, but if the browser omnibar (or awesomebar or whateverbar) could do that - it'd be much more convenient.

score 7 · Accepted Answer · edited Nov 16 '19 at 02:29

7

Chrome does this if you go to the History view and enter a query in the search box there.

Open the History view with Ctrl+H or by selecting it from the Spanner (Wrench) menu.

edited Nov 16 '19 at 02:29

G-Man Says 'Reinstate Monica'

7,678
22
41
87

answered Sep 17 '09 at 07:28

David Webb

11,876
3
43
39

Would have been surprising if Chrome wasn't able to search like that. – random Sep 17 '09 at 08:06
But it seems to have the drawback it won't search (or cache, I guess) ssl pages, which is an increasing fraction of the web. – poolie Jul 13 '12 at 19:01
I was actually surprised to learn that Chrome supported this feature by default - are no 3rd-party tools needed for searching the full text of a user's web history? – Anderson Green Jul 27 '12 at 02:56
@AndersonGreen - no extra tools. Chrome will search your history like this out of the box. – David Webb Jul 30 '12 at 13:31
11

Surprise! Chrome no longer does. [Intentionally](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=297648). And current versions of Opera no longer do, either. – Pierre Lebeaupin Nov 24 '13 at 10:55
How do you do that? I just tried and searched for an uncommon word that appeared in an article I just read in Chrome (Mac OS X) and it returned nothing. – d-b Nov 09 '19 at 10:45
@PierreLebeaupinpi This is so sad. Any alternative methods? – High GPA Aug 03 '20 at 02:07

score 6 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 01 '20 at 10:15

6

Falcon

Since WorldBrain's Memex recently deprecated this feature, I went looking and discovered Falcon. Turns out, WorldBrain was a fork of Falcon anyway, according to the author.

To use, enter f + spacebar + your search terms in the browser address bar.

answered Oct 01 '20 at 10:15

vith

61
1
1

How to get more than seven results? – High GPA Jan 08 '21 at 02:32

score 5 · Answer 3 · edited Sep 20 '11 at 04:31

5

This feature can be found in Opera. You can search your browser history and pull up relevant pages that contain that phrase on the page itself and not constrained to just the title of the page alone.

opera search results

edited Sep 20 '11 at 04:31

Gaff

18,569
15
57
68

answered Sep 17 '09 at 07:05

random

14,638
9
54
58

score 4 · Answer 4 · answered Jan 04 '17 at 12:36

4

Try WorldBrain.io

You can try out the free WorldBrain chrome extension. It lets you full-text search all the pages & PDFs you visited and bookmarked.

Downloadable here: www.worldbrain.io

Note: I am the founder of this project.

answered Jan 04 '17 at 12:36

Oliver Sauter

141
1

I like the ability to import bookmarks and previous history. Gives me a running start on full text search. – Sun May 17 '17 at 16:49
This stops working too, sadly. – High GPA Jan 08 '21 at 02:17

Deryck · Answer 5 · 2014-11-13T02:32:01.307

3

Try fetching.io

Complete, fulltext history search - indexes all pages browsed.

Index stored locally (only available on Mac - Linux coming soon) or cloud-based.

Free while in beta (at least as of 12 Nov 2014).

Enable this search from omnibox by typing f, space and then your search.

Like:

f bottlenose dolphin

edited Nov 13 '14 at 02:32

answered Nov 13 '14 at 01:57

Deryck

268
2
9

fetching.io is great if I do say so myself! – PETER BROWN Dec 15 '14 at 22:04
lol feel like I'm playing pong and just had a celeb shot for the winner haha – Deryck Dec 18 '14 at 04:04
Looks like a paid product as of May 2017. – Sun May 17 '17 at 16:42

tony722 · Answer 6 · 2017-05-17T20:43:28.877

3

Since Chrome & Opera both discontinued support for full-text search, here is a current extension that I found:

All Seeing Eye Chrome extension

All Seeing Eye stores your history on your local machine, instead of in the "cloud", for greater privacy/security. And it can be used in Opera with the Download Chrome extension for Opera which lets you use extensions from the Chrome Store.

edited May 17 '17 at 20:43

answered Nov 12 '15 at 23:55

tony722

183
6

score 1 · Answer 7 · answered Dec 25 '18 at 16:54

1

I'm assuming you're not on macOS, but just for reference for those that are on macOS and want to compare browsers:

Safari does this natively. Just enter a search term in the history text box:

... and it'll search the content of the document in addition to the title and url of the site.

answered Dec 25 '18 at 16:54

Senseful

4,150
10
37
46

This is another reason I want to use Safari but it is missing so many useful extensions! Can's wait when they let devs port chrome extensions to Safari. – ruslaniv Jul 04 '20 at 07:54

Full text Search of browser history, through the browser

7 Answers7

Falcon

Try WorldBrain.io

Try fetching.io

Linked